The United
Empire LoyalistsA Chronicle of the Great Migration by W. Stewart
Wallace (1914)

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The United Empire Loyalists
have suffered a strange fate at the hands of historians. It is not too much
to say that for nearly a century their history was written by their enemies.
English writers, for obvious reasons, took little pleasure in dwelling on
the American Revolution, and most of the early accounts were therefore
American in their origin. Any one who takes the trouble to read these early
accounts will be struck by the amazing manner in which the Loyalists are
treated. They are either ignored entirely or else they are painted in the
blackest colours.

So vile a crew the world
ne'er saw before,
And grant, ye pitying heavens, it may no more!
If ghosts from hell infest our poisoned air,
Those ghosts have entered these base bodies here.

So sang a ballad-monger of
the Revolution; and the opinion which he voiced persisted after him.
According to some American historians of the first half of the nineteenth
century, the Loyalists were a comparatively insignificant class of vicious
criminals, and the people of the American colonies were all but unanimous in
their armed opposition to the British government.

Within recent years,
however, there has been a change. American historians of a new school have
revised the history of the Revolution, and a tardy reparation has been made
to the memory of the Tories of that day. Tyler, Van Tyne, Flick, and other
writers have all made the amende honorable on behalf of their countrymen.
Indeed, some of these writers, in their anxiety to stand straight, have
leaned backwards; and by no one perhaps will the ultra-Tory view of the
Revolution be found so clearly expressed as by them. At the same time the
history of the Revolution has been rewritten by some English historians; and
we have a writer like Lecky declaring that the American Revolution 'was the
work of an energetic minority, who succeeded in committing an undecided and
fluctuating majority to courses for which they had little love, and leading
them step by step to a position from which it was impossible to recede.'

Thus, in the United States
and in England, the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other. In
Canada it has remained stationary. There, in the country where they settled,
the United Empire Loyalists are still regarded with an uncritical veneration
which has in it something of the spirit of primitive ancestor-worship. The
interest which Canadians have taken in the Loyalists has been either
patriotic or genealogical; and few attempts have been made to tell their
story in the cold light of impartial history, or to estimate the results
which have flowed from their migration. Yet such an attempt is worth while
making—an attempt to do the United Empire Loyalists the honour of painting
them as they were, and of describing the profound and far-reaching
influences which they exerted on the history of both Canada and the United
States.

In the history of the
United States the exodus of the Loyalists is an event comparable only to the
expulsion of the Huguenots from France after the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes. The Loyalists, whatever their social status (and they were not all
aristocrats), represented the conservative and moderate element in the
revolting states; and their removal, whether by banishment or
disfranchisement, meant the elimination of a very wholesome element in the
body politic. To this were due in part no doubt many of the early errors of
the republic in finance, diplomacy, and politics. At the same time it was a
circumstance which must have hastened by many years the triumph of
democracy. In the tenure of land, for example, the emigration produced a
revolution. The confiscated estates of the great Tory landowners were in
most cases cut up into small lots and sold to the common people; and thus
the process of levelling and making more democratic the whole social
structure was accelerated.

On the Canadian body
politic the impress of the Loyalist migration is so deep that it would be
difficult to overestimate it. It is no exaggeration to say that the United
Empire Loyalists changed the course of the current of Canadian history.
Before 1783 the clearest observers saw no future before Canada but that of a
French colony under the British crown. 'Barring a catastrophe shocking to
think of,' wrote Sir Guy Carleton in 1767, 'this country must, to the end of
time, be peopled by the Canadian race, who have already taken such firm
root, and got to so great a height, that any new stock transplanted will be
totally hid, except in the towns of Quebec and Montreal.' Just how
discerning this prophecy was may be judged from the fact that even to-day it
holds true with regard to the districts that were settled at the time it was
written. What rendered it void was the unexpected influx of the refugees of
the Revolution. The effect of this immigration was to create two new
English-speaking provinces, New Brunswick and Upper Canada, and to
strengthen the English element in two other provinces, Lower Canada and Nova
Scotia, so that ultimately the French population in Canada was outnumbered
by the English population surrounding it. Nor should the character of this
English immigration escape notice. It was not only English; but it was also
filled with a passionate loyalty to the British crown. This fact serves to
explain a great deal in later Canadian history. Before 1783 the continuance
of Canada in the British Empire was by no means assured: after 1783 the
Imperial tie was well-knit.

Nor can there be any doubt
that the coming of the Loyalists hastened the advent of free institutions.
It was the settlement of Upper Canada that rendered the Quebec Act of 1774
obsolete, and made necessary the Constitutional Act of 1791, which granted
to the Canadas representative assemblies. The Loyalists were Tories and
Imperialists; but, in the colonies from which they came, they had been
accustomed to a very advanced type of democratic government, and it was not
to be expected that they would quietly reconcile themselves in their new
home to the arbitrary system of the Quebec Act. The French Canadians, on the
other hand, had not been accustomed to representative institutions, and did
not desire them. But when Upper Canada was granted an assembly, it was
impossible not to grant an assembly to Lower Canada too; and so Canada was
started on that road of constitutional development which has brought her to
her present position as a self-governing unit in the British Empire.

CHAPTER II

LOYALISM IN THE THIRTEEN
COLONIES

It was a remark of John
Fiske that the American Revolution was merely a phase of English party
politics in the eighteenth century. In this view there is undoubtedly an
element of truth. The Revolution was a struggle within the British Empire,
in which were aligned on one side the American Whigs supported by the
English Whigs, and on the other side the English Tories supported by the
American Tories. The leaders of the Whig party in England, Charles James
Fox, Edmund Burke, Colonel Barre, the great Chatham himself, all championed
the cause of the American revolutionists in the English parliament. There
were many cases of Whig officers in the English army who refused to serve
against the rebels in America. General Richard Montgomery, who led the
revolutionists in their attack on Quebec in 1775-76, furnishes the case of
an English officer who, having resigned his commission, came to America and,
on the outbreak of the rebellion, took service in the rebel forces. On the
other hand there were thousands of American Tories who took service under
the king's banner; and some of the severest defeats which the rebel forces
suffered were encountered at their hands.

It would be a mistake,
however, to identify too closely the parties in England with the parties in
America. The old Tory party in England was very different from the so-called
Tory party in America. The term Tory in America was, as a matter of fact, an
epithet of derision applied by the revolutionists to all who opposed them.
The opponents of the revolutionists called themselves not Tories, but
Loyalists or 'friends of government.'

There were, it is true,
among the Loyalists not a few who held language that smacked of Toryism.
Among the Loyalist pamphleteers there were those who preached the doctrine
of passive obedience and non-resistance. Thus the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, a
clergyman of Virginia, wrote:

Having then, my brethren,
thus long been tossed to and fro in a wearisome circle of uncertain
traditions, or in speculations and projects still more uncertain, concerning
government, what better can you do than, following the apostle's advice, 'to
submit yourselves to every ordinance of man, for the Lord's sake; whether it
be to the king as supreme, or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by
him for the punishment of evil-doers, and for the praise of them that do
well? For, so is the will of God, that with well-doing ye may put to silence
the ignorance of foolish men; as free, and not using your liberty for a
cloak of maliciousness, but as servants of God. Honour all men: love the
brotherhood: fear God: honour the king.'

Jonathan Boucher subscribed
to the doctrine of the divine right of kings:

Copying after the fair
model of heaven itself, wherein there was government even among the angels,
the families of the earth were subjected to rulers, at first set over them
by God. 'For there is no power, but of God: the powers that be are ordained
of God.' The first father was the first king… Hence it is, that our church,
in perfect conformity with the doctrine here inculcated, in her explication
of the fifth commandment, from the obedience due to parents, wisely derives
the congenial duty of 'honouring the king, and all that are put in authority
under him.'

Dr Myles Cooper, the
president of King's College, took up similar ground. God, he said,
established the laws of government, ordained the British power, and
commanded all to obey authority. 'The laws of heaven and earth' forbade
rebellion. To threaten open disrespect of government was 'an unpardonable
crime.' 'The principles of submission and obedience to lawful authority'
were religious duties.

But even Jonathan Boucher
and Myles Cooper did not apply these doctrines without reserve. They both
upheld the sacred right of petition and remonstrance. 'It is your duty,'
wrote Boucher, 'to instruct your members to take all the constitutional
means in their power to obtain redress.' Both he and Cooper deplored the
policy of the British ministry. Cooper declared the Stamp Act to be contrary
to American rights; he approved of the opposition to the duties on the
enumerated articles; and he was inclined to think the duty on tea 'dangerous
to constitutional liberty.'

It may be confidently
asserted that the great majority of the American Loyalists, in fact, did not
approve of the course pursued by the British government between 1765 and
1774. They did not deny its legality; but they doubted as a rule either its
wisdom or its justice. Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, one
of the most famous and most hated of the Loyalists, went to England, if we
are to believe his private letters, with the secret ambition of obtaining
the repeal of the act which closed Boston harbour. Joseph Galloway, another
of the Loyalist leaders, and the author of the last serious attempt at
conciliation, actually sat in the first Continental Congress, which was
called with the object of obtaining the redress of what Galloway himself
described as 'the grievances justly complained of.' Still more instructive
is the case of Daniel Dulany of Maryland. Dulany, one of the most
distinguished lawyers of his time, was after the Declaration of Independence
denounced as a Tory; his property was confiscated, and the safety of his
person imperilled. Yet at the beginning of the Revolution he had been found
in the ranks of the Whig pamphleteers; and no more damaging attack was ever
made on the policy of the British government than that contained in
hisConsiderations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British
Colonies. When the elder Pitt attacked the Stamp Act in the House of Commons
in January 1766, he borrowed most of his argument from this pamphlet, which
had appeared three months before.

This difficulty which many
of the Loyalists felt with regard to the justice of the position taken up by
the British government greatly weakened the hands of the Loyalist party in
the early stages of the Revolution. It was only as the Revolution gained
momentum that the party grew in vigour and numbers. A variety of factors
contributed to this result. In the first place there were the excesses of
the revolutionary mob. When the mob took to sacking private houses, driving
clergymen out of their pulpits, and tarring and feathering respectable
citizens, there were doubtless many law-abiding people who became Tories in
spite of themselves. Later on, the methods of the inquisitorial communities
possibly made Tories out of some who were the victims of their attentions.
The outbreak of armed rebellion must have shocked many into a reactionary
attitude. It was of these that a Whig satirist wrote, quoting:

This word, Rebellion,
hath frozen them up,
Like fish in a pond.

But the event which brought
the greatest reinforcement to the Loyalist ranks was the Declaration of
Independence. Six months before the Declaration of Independence was passed
by the Continental Congress, the Whig leaders had been almost unanimous in
repudiating any intention of severing the connection between the mother
country and the colonies. Benjamin Franklin told Lord Chatham that he had
never heard in America one word in favour of independence 'from any person,
drunk or sober.' Jonathan Boucher says that Washington told him in the
summer of 1775 'that if ever I heard of his joining in any such measures, I
had his leave to set him down for everything wicked.' As late as Christmas
Day 1775 the revolutionary congress of New Hampshire officially proclaimed
their disavowal of any purpose 'aiming at independence.' Instances such as
these could be reproduced indefinitely. When, therefore, the Whig leaders in
the summer of 1776 made their right-about-face with regard to independence,
it is not surprising that some of their followers fell away from them. Among
these were many who were heartily opposed to the measures of the British
government, and who had even approved of the policy of armed rebellion. but
who could not forget that they were born British subjects. They drank to the
toast, 'My country, may she always be right; but right or wrong, my
country.'

Other motives influenced
the growth of the Loyalist party. There were those who opposed the
Revolution because they were dependent on government for their livelihood,
royal office-holders and Anglican clergymen for instance. There were those
who were Loyalists because they thought they had picked the winning side,
such as the man who candidly wrote from New Brunswick in 1788, 'I have made
one great mistake in politics, for which reason I never intend to make so
great a blunder again.' Many espoused the cause because they were natives of
the British Isles, and had not become thoroughly saturated with American
ideas: of the claimants for compensation before the Royal Commissioners
after the war almost two-thirds were persons who had been born in England,
Scotland, or Ireland. In some of the colonies the struggle between Whig and
Tory followed older party lines: this was especially true in New York, where
the Livingston or Presbyterian party became Whig and the De Lancey or
Episcopalian party Tory. Curiously enough the cleavage in many places
followed religious lines. The members of the Church of England were in the
main Loyalists; the Presbyterians were in the main revolutionists. The
revolutionist cause was often strongest in those colonies, such as
Connecticut, where the Church of England was weakest. But the division was
far from being a strict one. There were even members of the Church of
England in the Boston Tea Party; and there were Presbyterians among the
exiles who went to Canada and Nova Scotia. The Revolution was not in any
sense a religious war; but religious differences contributed to embitter the
conflict, and doubtless made Whigs or Tories of people who had no other
interest at stake.

It is commonly supposed
that the Loyalists drew their strength from the upper classes in the
colonies, while the revolutionists drew theirs from the proletariat. There
is just enough truth in this to make it misleading. It is true that among
the official classes and the large landowners, among the clergymen, lawyers,
and physicians, the majority were Loyalists; and it is true that the mob was
everywhere revolutionist. But it cannot be said that the Revolution was in
any sense a war of social classes. In it father was arrayed against son and
brother against brother. Benjamin Franklin was a Whig; his son, Sir William
Franklin, was a Tory. In the valley of the Susquehanna the Tory Colonel John
Butler, of Butler's Rangers, found himself confronted by his Whig cousins,
Colonel William Butler and Colonel Zeb Butler. George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, John Adams, were not inferior in social status to Sir William
Johnson, Thomas Hutchinson, and Joseph Galloway. And, on the other hand,
there were no humbler peasants in the revolutionary ranks than some of the
Loyalist farmers who migrated to Upper Canada in 1783. All that can be said
is that the Loyalists were most numerous among those classes which had most
to lose by the change, and least numerous among those classes which had
least to lose.

Much labour has been spent
on the problem of the numbers of the Loyalists. No means of numbering
political opinions was resorted to at the time of the Revolution, so that
satisfactory statistics are not available. There was, moreover, throughout
the contest a good deal of going and coming between the Whig and Tory camps,
which makes an estimate still more difficult. 'I have been struck,' wrote
Lorenzo Sabine, 'in the course of my investigations, with the absence of
fixed principles, not only among people in the common walks of life, but in
many of the prominent personages of the day.' Alexander Hamilton, for
instance, deserted from the Tories to the Whigs; Benedict Arnold deserted
from the Whigs to the Tories.

The Loyalists themselves
always maintained that they constituted an actual majority in the Thirteen
Colonies. In 1779 they professed to have more troops in the field than the
Continental Congress. These statements were no doubt exaggerations. The fact
is that the strength of the Loyalists was very unevenly distributed. In the
colony of New York they may well have been in the majority. They were strong
also in Pennsylvania, so strong that an officer of the revolutionary army
described that colony as 'the enemies' country.' 'New York and
Pennsylvania,' wrote John Adams years afterwards, 'were so nearly divided—if
their propensity was not against us—that if New England on one side and
Virginia on the other had not kept them in awe, they would have joined the
British.' In Georgia the Loyalists were in so large a majority that in 1781
that colony would probably have detached itself from the revolutionary
movement had it not been for the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. On the
other hand, in the New England colonies the Loyalists were a small minority,
strongest perhaps in Connecticut, and yet even there predominant only in one
or two towns.

There were in the Thirteen
Colonies at the time of the Revolution in the neighbourhood of three million
people. Of these it is probable that at least one million were Loyalists.
This estimate is supported by the opinion of John Adams, who was well
qualified to form a judgment, and whose Whig sympathies were not likely to
incline him to exaggerate. He gave it as his opinion more than once that
about one-third of the people of the Thirteen Colonies had been opposed to
the measures of the Revolution in all its stages. This estimate he once
mentioned in a letter to Thomas McKean, chief justice of Pennsylvania, who
had signed the Declaration of Independence, and had been a member of every
Continental Congress from that of 1765 to the close of the Revolution; and
McKean replied, 'You say that … about a third of the people of the colonies
were against the Revolution. It required much reflection before I could fix
my opinion on this subject; but on mature deliberation I conclude you are
right, and that more than a third of influential characters were against
it.'

CHAPTER III

PERSECUTION OF THE
LOYALISTS

In the autumn of the year
1779 an English poet, writing in the seclusion of his garden at Olney, paid
his respects to the American revolutionists in the following lines:

Yon roaring boys, who
rave and fight
On t'other side the Atlantic,
I always held them in the right,
But most so when most frantic.

When lawless mobs insult
the court,
That man shall be my toast,
If breaking windows be the sport,
Who bravely breaks the most.

But oh! for him my fancy
culls
The choicest flowers she bears,
Who constitutionally pulls
Your house about your ears.

When William Cowper wrote
these lines, his sources of information with regard to affairs in America
were probably slight; but had he been writing at the seat of war he could
not have touched off the treatment of the Loyalists by the revolutionists
with more effective irony.

There were two kinds of
persecution to which the Loyalists were subjected—that which was perpetrated
by 'lawless mobs,' and that which was carried out 'constitutionally.'

It was at the hands of the
mob that the Loyalists first suffered persecution. Probably the worst of the
revolutionary mobs was that which paraded the streets of Boston. In 1765, at
the time of the Stamp Act agitation, large crowds in Boston attacked and
destroyed the magnificent houses of Andrew Oliver and Thomas Hutchinson.
They broke down the doors with broadaxes, destroyed the furniture, stole the
money and jewels, scattered the books and papers, and, having drunk the
wines in the cellar, proceeded to the dismantling of the roof and walls. The
owners of the houses barely escaped with their lives. In 1768 the same mob
wantonly attacked the British troops in Boston, and so precipitated what
American historians used to term 'the Boston Massacre'; and in 1773 the
famous band of 'Boston Indians' threw the tea into Boston harbour.

In other places the
excesses of the mob were nearly as great. In New York they were active in
destroying printing-presses from which had issued Tory pamphlets, in
breaking windows of private houses, in stealing live stock and personal
effects, and in destroying property. A favourite pastime was tarring and
feathering 'obnoxious Tories.' This consisted in stripping the victim naked,
smearing him with a coat of tar and feathers, and parading him about the
streets in a cart for the contemplation of his neighbours. Another amusement
was making Tories ride the rail. This consisted in putting the 'unhappy
victims upon sharp rails with one leg on each side; each rail was carried
upon the shoulders of two tall men, with a man on each side to keep the poor
wretch straight and fixed in his seat.'

Even clergymen were not
free from the attentions of the mob. The Rev. Jonathan Boucher tells us that
he was compelled to preach with loaded pistols placed on the pulpit cushions
beside him. On one occasion he was prevented from entering the pulpit by two
hundred armed men, whose leader warned him not to attempt to preach. 'I
returned for answer,' says Boucher, 'that there was but one way by which
they could keep me out of it, and that was by taking away my life. At the
proper time, with my sermon in one hand and a loaded pistol in the other,
like Nehemiah I prepared to ascend my pulpit, when one of my friends, Mr
David Crauford, having got behind me, threw his arms round me and held me
fast. He assured me that he had heard the most positive orders given to
twenty men picked out for the purpose, to fire on me the moment I got into
the pulpit.'

That the practices of the
mob were not frowned upon by the revolutionary leaders, there is good reason
for believing. The provincial Congress of New York, in December 1776, went
so far as to order the committee of public safety to secure all the pitch
and tar 'necessary for the public use and public safety.' Even Washington
seems to have approved of persecution of the Tories by the mob. In 1776
General Putnam, meeting a procession of the Sons of Liberty who were
parading a number of Tories on rails up and down the street's of New York,
attempted to put a stop to the barbarous proceeding. Washington, on hearing
of this, administered a reprimand to Putnam, declaring 'that to discourage
such proceedings was to injure the cause of liberty in which they were
engaged, and that nobody would attempt it but an enemy to his country.'

Very early in the
Revolution the Whigs began to organize. They first formed themselves into
local associations, similar to the Puritan associations in the Great
Rebellion in England, and announced that they would 'hold all those persons
inimical to the liberties of the colonies who shall refuse to subscribe this
association.' In connection with these associations there sprang up local
committees.

From garrets, cellars,
rushing through the street,
The new-born statesmen in committee meet,

sang a Loyalist
verse-writer. Very soon there was completed an organization, stretching from
the Continental Congress and the provincial congresses at one end down to
the pettiest parish committees on the other, which was destined to prove a
most effective engine for stamping out loyalism, and which was to contribute
in no small degree to the success of the Revolution.

Though the action of the
mob never entirely disappeared, the persecution of the Tories was taken
over, as soon as the Revolution got under way, by this semi-official
organization. What usually happened was that the Continental or provincial
Congress laid down the general policy to be followed, and the local
committees carried it out in detail. Thus, when early in 1776 the
Continental Congress recommended the disarming of the Tories, it was the
local committees which carried the recommendation into effect. During this
early period the conduct of the revolutionary authorities was remarkably
moderate. They arrested the Tories, tried them, held them at bail for their
good behaviour, quarantined them in their houses, exiled them to other
districts, but only in extreme cases did they imprison them. There was, of
course, a good deal of hardship entailed on the Tories; and occasionally the
agents of the revolutionary committees acted without authority, as when
Colonel Dayton, who was sent to arrest Sir John Johnson at his home in the
Mohawk valley, sacked Johnson Hall and carried off Lady Johnson a prisoner,
on finding that Sir John Johnson had escaped to Canada with many of his
Highland retainers. But, as a rule, in this early period, the measures taken
both by the revolutionary committees and by the army officers were easily
defensible on the ground of military necessity.

But with the Declaration of
Independence a new order of things was inaugurated. That measure
revolutionized the political situation. With the severance of the Imperial
tie, loyalism became tantamount to treason to the state; and Loyalists laid
themselves open to all the penalties of treason. The Declaration of
Independence was followed by the test laws. These laws compelled every one
to abjure allegiance to the British crown, and swear allegiance to the state
in which he resided. A record was kept of those who took the oath, and to
them were given certificates without which no traveller was safe from
arrest. Those who failed to take the oath became liable to imprisonment,
confiscation of property, banishment, and even death.

Even among the Whigs there
was a good deal of opposition to the test laws. Peter Van Schaak, a moderate
Whig of New York state, so strongly disapproved of the test laws that he
seceded from the revolutionary party. 'Had you,' he wrote, 'at the beginning
of the war, permitted every one differing in sentiment from you, to take the
other side, or at least to have removed out of the State, with their
property … it would have been a conduct magnanimous and just. But, now,
after restraining those persons from removing; punishing them, if, in the
attempt, they were apprehended; selling their estates if they escaped;
compelling them to the duties of subjects under heavy penalties; deriving
aid from them in the prosecution of the war … now to compel them to take an
oath is an act of severity.'

Of course, the test laws
were not rigidly or universally enforced. In Pennsylvania only a small
proportion of the population took the oath. In New York, out of one thousand
Tories arrested for failure to take the oath, six hundred were allowed to go
on bail, and the rest were merely acquitted or imprisoned. On the whole the
American revolutionists were not bloody-minded men; they inaugurated no
September Massacres, no Reign of Terror, no dragonnades. There was a
distinct aversion among them to applying the death penalty. 'We shall have
many unhappy persons to take their trials for their life next Oyer court,'
wrote a North Carolina patriot. 'Law should be strictly adhered to, severity
exercised, but the doors of mercy should never be shut.'

The test laws,
nevertheless, and the other discriminating laws passed against the Loyalists
provided the excuse for a great deal of barbarism and ruthlessness. In
Pennsylvania bills of attainder were passed against no fewer than four
hundred and ninety persons. The property of nearly all these persons was
confiscated, and several of them were put to death. A detailed account has
come down to us of the hanging of two Loyalists of Philadelphia named
Roberts and Carlisle. These two men had shown great zeal for the king's
cause when the British Army was in Philadelphia. After Philadelphia was
evacuated, they were seized by the Whigs, tried, and condemned to be hanged.
Roberts's wife and children went before Congress and on their knees begged
for mercy; but in vain. One November morning of 1778 the two men were
marched to the gallows, with halters round their necks. At the gallows,
wrote a spectator, Roberts's behaviour 'did honour to human nature.'

He nothing common did or
mean
Upon that memorable scene

Addressing the spectators,
he told them that his conscience acquitted him of guilt; that he suffered
for doing his duty to his sovereign; and that his blood would one day be
required at their hands. Then he turned to his children and charged them to
remember the principles for which he died, and to adhere to them while they
had breath.

But if these judicial
murders were few and far between, in other respects the revolutionists
showed the Tories little mercy. Both those who remained in the country and
those who fled from it were subjected to an attack on their personal
fortunes which gradually impoverished them. This was carried on at first by
a nibbling system of fines and special taxation. Loyalists were fined for
evading military service, for the hire of substitutes, for any manifestation
of loyalty. They were subjected to double and treble taxes; and in New York
and South Carolina they had to make good all robberies committed in their
counties. Then the revolutionary leaders turned to the expedient of
confiscation. From the very first some of the patriots, without doubt, had
an eye on Loyalist property; and when the coffers of the Continental
Congress had been emptied, the idea gained ground that the Revolution might
be financed by the confiscation of Loyalist estates. Late in 1777 the plan
was embodied in a resolution of the Continental Congress, and the states
were recommended to invest the proceeds in continental loan certificates.
The idea proved very popular; and in spite of a great deal of corruption in
connection with the sale and transfer of the land, large sums found their
way as a result into the state exchequers. In New York alone over 3,600,000
pounds worth of property was acquired by the state.

The Tory who refused to
take the oath of allegiance became in fact an outlaw. He did not have in the
courts of law even the rights of a foreigner. If his neighbours owed him
money, he had no legal redress. He might be assaulted, insulted,
blackmailed, or slandered, yet the law granted him no remedy. No relative or
friend could leave an orphan child to his guardianship. He could be the
executor or administrator of no man's estate. He could neither buy land nor
transfer it to another. If he was a lawyer, he was denied the right to
practise his profession.

This strict legal view of
the status of the Loyalist may not have been always and everywhere enforced.
There were Loyalists, such as the Rev. Mather Byles of Boston, who refused
to be molested, and who survived the Revolution unharmed. But when all
allowance is made for these exceptions, it is not difficult to understand
how the great majority of avowed Tories came to take refuge within the
British lines, to enlist under the British flag, and, when the Revolution
had proved successful, to leave their homes for ever and begin life anew
amid other surroundings. The persecution to which they were subjected left
them no alternative.

CHAPTER IV

THE LOYALISTS UNDER ARMS

It has been charged against
the Loyalists, and the charge cannot be denied, that at the beginning of the
Revolution they lacked initiative, and were slow to organize and defend
themselves. It was not, in fact, until 1776 that Loyalist regiments began to
be formed on an extensive scale. There were several reasons why this was so.
In the first place a great many of the Loyalists, as has been pointed out,
were not at the outset in complete sympathy with the policy of the British
government; and those who might have been willing to take up arms were very
early disarmed and intimidated by the energy of the revolutionary
authorities. In the second place that very conservatism which made the
Loyalists draw back from revolution hindered them from taking arms until the
king gave them commissions and provided facilities for military
organization. And there is no fact better attested in the history of the
Revolution than the failure of the British authorities to understand until
it was too late the great advantages to be derived from the employment of
Loyalist levies. The truth is that the British officers did not think much
more highly of the Loyalists than they did of the rebels. For both they had
the Briton's contempt for the colonial, and the professional soldier's
contempt for the armed civilian.

Had more use been made of
the Tories, the military history of the Revolution might have been very
different. They understood the conditions of warfare in the New World much
better than the British regulars or the German mercenaries. Had the advice
of prominent Loyalists been accepted by the British commander at the battle
of Bunker's Hill, it is highly probable that there would have been none of
that carnage in the British ranks which made of the victory a virtual
defeat. It was said that Burgoyne's early successes were largely due to the
skill with which he used his Loyalist auxiliaries. And in the latter part of
the war, it must be confessed that the successes of the Loyalist troops far
outshone those of the British regulars. In the Carolinas Tarleton's Loyal
Cavalry swept everything before them, until their defeat at the Cowpens by
Daniel Morgan. In southern New York Governor Tryon's levies carried fire and
sword up the Hudson, into 'Indigo Connecticut,' and over into New Jersey.
Along the northern frontier, the Loyalist forces commanded by Sir John
Johnson and Colonel Butler made repeated incursions into the Mohawk,
Schoharie, and Wyoming valleys and, in each case, after leaving a trail of
desolation behind them, they withdrew to the Canadian border in good order.
The trouble was that, owing to the stupidity and incapacity of Lord George
Germain, the British minister who was more than any other man responsible
for the misconduct of the American War, these expeditions were not made part
of a properly concerted plan; and so they sank into the category of isolated
raids.

From the point of view of
Canadian history, the most interesting of these expeditions were those
conducted by Sir John Johnson and Colonel Butler. They were carried on with
the Canadian border as their base-line. It was by the men who were engaged
in them that Upper Canada was at first largely settled; and for a century
and a quarter there have been levelled against these men by American and
even by English writers charges of barbarism and inhumanity about which
Canadians in particular are interested to know the truth.

Most of Johnson's and
Butler's men came from central or northern New York. To explain how this
came about it is necessary to make an excursion into previous history. In
1738 there had come out to America a young Irishman of good family named
William Johnson. The famous naval hero, Sir Peter Warren, who was an uncle
of Johnson, had large tracts of land in the Mohawk valley, in northern New
York. These estates he employed his nephew in administering; and, when he
died, he bequeathed them to him. In the meantime William Johnson had begun
to improve his opportunities. He had built up a prosperous trade with the
Indians; he had learned their language and studied their ways; and he had
gained such an ascendancy over them that he came to be known as 'the
Indian-tamer,' and was appointed the British superintendent-general for
Indian Affairs. In the Seven Years' War he served with great distinction
against the French. He defeated Baron Dieskau at Lake George in 1755, and he
captured Niagara in 1759; for the first of these services he was created a
baronet, and received a pension of 5,000 pounds a year. During his later
years he lived at his house, Johnson Hall, on the Mohawk river; and he died
in 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution, leaving his title and his
vast estates to his only son, Sir John.

Just before his death Sir
William Johnson had interested himself in schemes for the colonization of
his lands. In these he was remarkably successful. He secured in the main two
classes of immigrants, Germans and Scottish Highlanders. Of the Highlanders
he must have induced more than one thousand to emigrate from Scotland, some
of them as late as 1773. Many of them had been Jacobites; some of them had
seen service at Culloden Moor; and one of them, Alexander Macdonell, whose
son subsequently sat in the first legislature of Upper Canada, had been on
Bonnie Prince Charlie's personal staff. These men had no love for the
Hanoverians; but their loyalty to their new chieftain, and their lack of
sympathy with American ideals, kept them at the time of the Revolution true
almost without exception to the British cause. King George had no more
faithful allies in the New World than these rebels of the '45.

They were the first of the
Loyalists to arm and organize themselves. In the summer of 1775 Colonel
Allan Maclean, a Scottish officer in the English army, aided by Colonel Guy
Johnson, a brother-in-law of Sir John Johnson, raised a regiment in the
Mohawk valley known as the Royal Highland Emigrants, which he took to
Canada, and which did good service against the American invaders under
Montgomery in the autumn of the same year. In the spring of 1776 Sir John
Johnson received word that the revolutionary authorities had determined on
his arrest, and he was compelled to flee from Johnson Hall to Canada. With
him he took three hundred of his Scottish dependants; and he was followed by
the Mohawk Indians under their famous chief, Joseph Brant. In Canada Johnson
received a colonel's commission to raise two Loyalist battalions of five
hundred men each, to be known as the King's Royal Regiment of New York. The
full complement was soon made up from the numbers of Loyalists who flocked
across the border from other counties of northern New York; and Sir John
Johnson's 'Royal Greens,' as they were commonly called, were in the thick of
nearly every border foray from that time until the end of the war. It was by
these men that the north shore of the St Lawrence river, between Montreal
and Kingston, was mainly settled. As the tide of refugees swelled, other
regiments were formed. Colonel John Butler, one of Sir John Johnson's
right-hand men, organized his Loyal Rangers, a body of irregular troops who
adopted, with modifications, the Indian method of warfare. It was against
this corps that some of the most serious charges of brutality and
bloodthirstiness were made by American historians; and it was by this corps
that the Niagara district of Upper Canada was settled after the war.

It is not possible here to
give more than a brief sketch of the operations of these troops. In 1777
they formed an important part of the forces with which General Burgoyne, by
way of Lake Champlain, and Colonel St Leger, by way of Oswego, attempted,
unsuccessfully, to reach Albany. An offshoot of the first battalion of the
'Royal Greens,' known as Jessup's Corps, was with Burgoyne at Saratoga; and
the rest of the regiment was with St Leger, under the command of Sir John
Johnson himself. The ambuscade of Oriskany, where Sir John Johnson's men
first met their Whig neighbours and relatives, who were defending Fort
Stanwix, was one of the bloodiest battles of the war. Its 'fratricidal
butchery' denuded the Mohawk valley of most of its male population; and it
was said that if Tryon county 'smiled again during the war, it smiled
through tears.' The battle was inconclusive, so bitterly was it contested;
but it was successful in stemming the advance of St Leger's forces.

The next year (1778) there
was an outbreak of sporadic raiding all along the border. Alexander
Macdonell, the former aide-de-camp of Bonnie Prince Charlie, fell with three
hundred Loyalists on the Dutch settlements of the Schoharie valley and laid
them waste. Macdonell's ideas of border warfare were derived from his
Highland ancestors; and, as he expected no quarter, he gave none. Colonel
Butler, with his Rangers and a party of Indians, descended into the valley
of Wyoming, which was a sort of debatable ground between Connecticut and
Pennsylvania, and carried fire and sword through the settlements there. This
raid was commemorated by Thomas Campbell in a most unhistorical poem
entitledGertrude of Wyoming:

On Susquehana's side,
fair Wyoming!
Although the wild-flower on thy ruined wall
And roofless homes a sad remembrance bring
Of what thy gentle people did befall.

Later in the year Walter
Butler, the son of Colonel John Butler, and Joseph Brant, with a party of
Loyalists and Mohawks, made a similar inroad on Cherry Valley, south of
Springfield in the state of New York. On this occasion Brant's Indians got
beyond control, and more than fifty defenceless old men, women, and children
were slaughtered in cold blood.

The Americans took their
revenge the following year. A large force under General Sullivan invaded the
settlements of the Six Nations Indians in the Chemung and Genesee valleys,
and exacted an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They burned the
villages, destroyed the crops, and turned the helpless women and children
out to face the coming winter. Most of the Indians during the winter of
1779-80 were dependent on the mercy of the British commissaries.

This kind of warfare tends
to perpetuate itself indefinitely. In 1780 the Loyalists and Indians
returned to the attack. In May Sir John Johnson with his 'Royal Greens' made
a descent into the Mohawk valley, fell upon his 'rebellious birthplace,' and
carried off rich booty and many prisoners. In the early autumn, with a force
composed of his own regiment, two hundred of Butler's Rangers, and some
regulars and Indians, he crossed over to the Schoharie valley, devastated
it, and then returned to the Mohawk valley, where he completed the work of
the previous spring. All attempts to crush him failed. At the battle of
Fox's Mills he escaped defeat or capture by the American forces under
General Van Rensselaer largely on account of the dense smoke with which the
air was filled from the burning of barns and villages.

How far the Loyalists under
Johnson and Butler were open to the charges of inhumanity and barbarism so
often levelled against them, is difficult to determine. The charges are
based almost wholly on unsubstantial tradition. The greater part of the
excesses complained of, it is safe to say, were perpetrated by the Indians;
and Sir John Johnson and Colonel Butler can no more be blamed for the
excesses of the Indians at Cherry Valley than Montcalm can be blamed for
their excesses at Fort William Henry. It was unfortunate that the military
opinion of that day regarded the use of savages as necessary, and no one
deplored this use more than men like Haldimand and Carleton; but Washington
and the Continental Congress were as ready to receive the aid of the Indians
as were the British. The difficulty of the Americans was that most of the
Indians were on the other side.

That there were, however,
atrocities committed by the Loyalists cannot be doubted. Sir John Johnson
himself told the revolutionists that 'their Tory neighbours, and not
himself, were blameable for those acts.' There are well-authenticated cases
of atrocities committed by Alexander Macdonell: in 1781 he ordered his men
to shoot down a prisoner taken near Johnstown, and when the men bungled
their task, Macdonell cut the prisoner down with his broadsword. When
Colonel Butler returned from Cherry Valley, Sir Frederick Haldimand refused
to see him, and wrote to him that 'such indiscriminate vengeance taken even
upon the treacherous and cruel enemy they are engaged against is useless and
disreputable to themselves, as it is contrary to the disposition and maxims
of their King whose cause they are fighting.'

But rumour exaggerated
whatever atrocities there were. For many years the Americans believed that
the Tories had lifted scalps like the Indians; and later, when the Americans
captured York in 1813, they found what they regarded as a signal proof of
this barbarous practice among the Loyalists, in the speaker's wig, which was
hanging beside the chair in the legislative chamber! There may have been
members of Butler's Rangers who borrowed from the Indians this hideous
custom, just as there were American frontiersmen who were guilty of it; but
it must not be imagined that it was a common practice on either side. Except
at Cherry Valley, there is no proof that any violence was done by the
Loyalists to women and children. On his return from Wyoming, Colonel Butler
reported: 'I can with truth inform you that in the destruction of this
settlement not a single person has been hurt of the inhabitants, but such as
were armed; to those indeed the Indians gave no quarter.'

In defence of the
Loyalists, two considerations may be urged. In the first place, it must be
remembered that they were men who had been evicted from their homes, and
whose property had been confiscated. They had been placed under the ban of
the law: the payment of their debts had been denied them; and they had been
forbidden to return to their native land under penalty of death without
benefit of clergy. They had been imprisoned, fined, subjected to special
taxation; their families had been maltreated, and were in many cases still
in the hands of their enemies. They would have been hardly human had they
waged a mimic warfare. In the second place, their depredations were of great
value from a military point of view. Not only did they prevent thousands of
militiamen from joining the Continental army, but they seriously threatened
the sources of Washington's food supply. The valleys which they ravaged were
the granary of the revolutionary forces. In 1780 Sir John Johnson destroyed
in the Schoharie valley alone no less than eighty thousand bushels of grain;
and this loss, as Washington wrote to the president of Congress, 'threatened
alarming consequences.' That this work of destruction was agreeable to the
Loyalists cannot be doubted; but this fact does not diminish its value as a
military measure.

CHAPTER V

PEACE WITHOUT HONOUR

The war was brought to a
virtual termination by the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown on October
19, 1781. The definitive articles of peace were signed at Versailles on
September 3, 1783. During the two years that intervened between these
events, the lot of the Loyalists was one of gloomy uncertainty. They found
it hard to believe that the British government would abandon them to the
mercy of their enemies; and yet the temper of the revolutionists toward them
continued such that there seemed little hope of concession or conciliation.
Success had not taught the rebels the grace of forgiveness. At the
capitulation of Yorktown, Washington had refused to treat with the Loyalists
in Cornwallis's army on the same terms as with the British regulars; and
Cornwallis had been compelled to smuggle his Loyalist levies out of Yorktown
on the ship that carried the news of his surrender to New York. As late as
1782 fresh confiscation laws had been passed in Georgia and the Carolinas;
and in New York a law had been passed cancelling all debts due to Loyalists,
on condition that one-fortieth of the debt was paid into the state treasury.
These were straws which showed the way the wind was blowing.

In the negotiations leading
up to the Peace of Versailles there were no clauses so long and bitterly
discussed as those relating to the Loyalists. The British commissioners
stood out at first for the principle of complete amnesty to them and
restitution of all they had lost; and it is noteworthy that the French
minister added his plea to theirs. But Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues
refused to agree to this formula. They took the ground that they, as the
representatives merely of the Continental Congress, had not the right to
bind the individual states in such a matter. The argument was a quibble.
Their real reason was that they were well aware that public opinion in
America would not support them in such a concession. A few enlightened men
in America, such as John Adams, favoured a policy of compensation to the
Loyalists, 'how little soever they deserve it, nay, how much soever they
deserve the contrary'; but the attitude of the great majority of the
Americans had been clearly demonstrated by a resolution passed in the
legislature of Virginia on December 17, 1782, to the effect that all demands
for the restitution of confiscated property were wholly inadmissible. Even
some of the Loyalists had begun to realize that a revolution which had
touched property was bound to be permanent, and that the American
commissioners could no more give back to them their confiscated lands than
Charles II was able to give back to his father's cavaliers the estates they
had lost in the Civil War.

The American commissioners
agreed, finally, that no future confiscations should take place, that
imprisoned Loyalists should be released, that no further persecutions should
be permitted, and that creditors on either side should 'meet with no lawful
impediment' to the recovery of all good debts in sterling money. But with
regard to the British demand for restitution, all they could be induced to
sign was a promise that Congress would 'earnestly recommend to the
legislatures of the respective states' a policy of amnesty and restitution.

In making this last
recommendation, it is difficult not to convict the American commissioners of
something very like hypocrisy. There seems to be no doubt that they knew the
recommendation would not be complied with; and little or no attempt was made
by them to persuade the states to comply with it. In after years the clause
was represented by the Americans as a mere form of words, necessary to bring
the negotiations to an end, and to save the face of the British government.
To this day it has remained, except in one or two states, a dead letter. On
the other hand it is impossible not to convict the British commissioners of
a betrayal of the Loyalists. 'Never,' said Lord North in the House of
Commons, 'never was the honour, the humanity, the principles, the policy of
a nation so grossly abused, as in the desertion of those men who are now
exposed to every punishment that desertion and poverty can inflict, because
they were not rebels.' 'In ancient or in modern history,' said Lord
Loughborough in the House of Lords, 'there cannot be found an instance of so
shameful a desertion of men who have sacrificed all to their duty and to
their reliance upon our faith.' It seems probable that the British
commissioners could have obtained, on paper at any rate, better terms for
the Loyalists. It is very doubtful if the Americans would have gone to war
again over such a question. In 1783 the position of Great Britain was
relatively not weaker, but stronger, than in 1781, when hostilities had
ceased. The attitude of the French minister, and the state of the French
finances, made it unlikely that France would lend her support to further
hostilities. And there is no doubt that the American states were even more
sorely in need of peace than was Great Britain.

When the terms of peace
were announced, great was the bitterness among the Loyalists. One of them
protested in Rivington's Gazette that 'even robbers, murderers, and rebels
are faithful to their fellows and never betray each other,' and another
sang,

'Tis an honour to serve
the bravest of nations,
And be left to be hanged in their capitulations.

If the terms of the peace
had been observed, the plight of the Loyalists would have been bad enough.
But as it was, the outcome proved even worse. Every clause in the treaty
relating to the Loyalists was broken over and over again. There was no sign
of an abatement of the popular feeling against them; indeed, in some places,
the spirit of persecution seemed to blaze out anew. One of Washington's
bitterest sayings was uttered at this time, when he said of the Loyalists
that 'he could see nothing better for them than to commit suicide.' Loyalist
creditors found it impossible to recover their debts in America, while they
were themselves sued in the British courts by their American creditors, and
their property was still being confiscated by the American legislatures. The
legislature of New York publicly declined to reverse its policy of
confiscation, on the ground that Great Britain had offered no compensation
for the property which her friends had destroyed. Loyalists who ventured to
return home under the treaty of peace were insulted, tarred and feathered,
whipped, and even ham-strung. All over the country there were formed local
committees or associations with the object of preventing renewed intercourse
with the Loyalists and the restitution of Loyalist property. 'The
proceedings of these people,' wrote Sir Guy Carleton, 'are not to be
attributed to politics alone—it serves as a pretence, and under that cloak
they act more boldly, but avarice and a desire of rapine are the great
incentives.'

The Loyalists were even
denied civil rights in most of the states. In 1784 an act was passed in New
York declaring that all who had held office under the British, or helped to
fit out vessels of war, or who had served as privates or officers in the
British Army, or who had left the state, were guilty of 'misprision of
treason,' and were disqualified from both the franchise and public office.
There was in fact hardly a state in 1785 where the Loyalist was allowed to
vote. In New York Loyalist lawyers were not allowed to practise until April
1786, and then only on condition of taking an 'oath of abjuration and
allegiance.' In the same state, Loyalists were subjected to such invidious
special taxation that in 1785 one of them confessed that 'those in New York
whose estates have not been confiscated are so loaded with taxes and other
grievances that there is nothing left but to sell out and move into the
protection of the British government.'

It was clear that something
would have to be done by the British government for the Loyalists' relief.
'It is utterly impossible,' wrote Sir Guy Carleton to Lord North, 'to leave
exposed to the rage and violence of these people [the Americans] men of
character whose only offence has been their attachment to the King's
service.' Accordingly the British government made amends for its betrayal of
the Loyalists by taking them under its wing. It arranged for the
transportation of all those who wished to leave the revolted states; it
offered them homes in the provinces of Nova Scotia and Quebec; it granted
half-pay to the officers after their regiments were reduced; and it
appointed a royal commission to provide compensation for the losses
sustained.

CHAPTER VI

THE EXODUS TO NOVA SCOTIA

When the terms of peace
became known, tens of thousands of the Loyalists shook the dust of their
ungrateful country from their feet, never to return. Of these the more
influential part, both during and after the war, sailed for England. The
royal officials, the wealthy merchants, landowners, and professional men;
the high military officers—these went to England to press their claims for
compensation and preferment. The humbler element, for the most part,
migrated to the remaining British colonies in North America. About two
hundred families went to the West Indies, a few to Newfoundland, many to
what were afterwards called Upper and Lower Canada, and a vast army to Nova
Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island.

The advantages of Nova
Scotia as a field for immigration had been known to the people of New
England and New York before the Revolutionary War had broken out. Shortly
after the Peace of 1763 parts of the Nova Scotian peninsula and the banks of
the river St John had been sparsely settled by colonists from the south; and
during the Revolutionary War considerable sympathy with the cause of the
Continental Congress was shown by these colonists from New England. Nova
Scotia, moreover, was contiguous to the New England colonies, and it was
therefore not surprising that after the Revolution the Loyalists should have
turned their eyes to Nova Scotia as a refuge for their families.

The first considerable
migration took place at the time of the evacuation of Boston by General Howe
in March 1776. Boston was at that time a town with a population of about
sixteen thousand inhabitants, and of these nearly one thousand accompanied
the British Army to Halifax. 'Neither Hell, Hull, nor Halifax,' said one of
them, 'can afford worse shelter than Boston.' The embarkation was
accomplished amid the most hopeless confusion. 'Nothing can be more
diverting,' wrote a Whig, 'than to see the town in its present situation;
all is uproar and confusion; carts, trucks, wheelbarrows, handbarrows,
coaches, chaises, all driving as if the very devil was after them.' The
fleet was composed of every vessel on which hands 'could be laid. In
Benjamin Hallowell's cabin there were thirty-seven persons—men, women, and
children; servants, masters, and mistresses—obliged to pig together on the
floor, there being no berths.' It was a miracle that the crazy flotilla
arrived safely at Halifax; but there it arrived after tossing about for six
days in the March tempests. General Howe remained with his army at Halifax
until June. Then he set sail for New York. Some of the Loyalists accompanied
him to New York, but the greater number took passage for England. Only a few
of the company remained in Nova Scotia.

From 1776 to 1783 small
bodies of Loyalists continually found their way to Halifax; but it was not
until the evacuation of New York by the British in 1783 that the full tide
of immigration set in. As soon as news leaked out that the terms of peace
were not likely to be favourable, and it became evident that the animus of
the Whigs showed no signs of abating, the Loyalists gathered in New York
looked about for a country in which to begin life anew. Most of them were
too poor to think of going to England, and the British provinces to the
north seemed the most hopeful place of resort. In 1782 several associations
were formed in New York for the purpose of furthering the interests of those
who proposed to settle in Nova Scotia. One of these associations had as its
president the famous Dr Seabury, and as its secretary Sampson Salter
Blowers, afterwards chief justice of Nova Scotia. Its officers waited on Sir
Guy Carleton, and received his approval of their plans. It was arranged that
a first instalment of about five hundred colonists should set out in the
autumn of 1782, in charge of three agents, Amos Botsford, Samuel Cummings,
and Frederick Hauser, whose duty it should be to spy out the land and obtain
grants.

The party sailed from New
York, in nine transport ships, on October 19, 1782, and arrived a few days
later at Annapolis Royal. The population of Annapolis, which was only a
little over a hundred, was soon swamped by the numbers that poured out of
the transports. 'All the houses and barracks are crowded,' wrote the Rev.
Jacob Bailey, who was then at Annapolis, 'and many are unable to procure any
lodgings.' The three agents, leaving the colonists at Annapolis, went first
to Halifax, and then set out on a trip of exploration through the Annapolis
valley, after which they crossed the Bay of Fundy and explored the country
adjacent to the river St John. On their return they published glowing
accounts of the country, and their report was transmitted to their friends
in New York.

The result of the
favourable reports sent in by these agents, and by others who had gone
ahead, was an invasion of Nova Scotia such as no one, not even the
provincial authorities, had begun to expect. As the names of the thousands
who were anxious to go to Nova Scotia poured into the adjutant-general's
office in New York, it became clear to Sir Guy Carleton that with the
shipping facilities at his disposal he could not attempt to transport them
all at once. It was decided that the ships would have to make two trips;
and, as a matter of fact, most of them made three or four trips before the
last British soldier was able to leave the New York shore.

On April 26, 1783, the
first or 'spring' fleet set sail. It had on board no less than seven
thousand persons, men, women, children, and servants. Half of these went to
the mouth of the river St John, and about half to Port Roseway, at the
south-west end of the Nova Scotian peninsula. The voyage was fair, and the
ships arrived at their destinations without mishap. But at St John at least,
the colonists found that almost no preparations had been made to receive
them. They were disembarked on a wild and primeval shore, where they had to
clear away the brushwood before they could pitch their tents or build their
shanties. The prospect must have been disheartening. 'Nothing but wilderness
before our eyes, the women and children did not refrain from tears,' wrote
one of the exiles; and the grandmother of Sir Leonard Tilley used to tell
her descendants, 'I climbed to the top of Chipman's Hill and watched the
sails disappearing in the distance, and such a feeling of loneliness came
over me that, although I had not shed a tear through all the war, I sat down
on the damp moss with my baby in my lap and cried.'

All summer and autumn the
ships kept plying to and fro. In June the 'summer fleet' brought about 2,500
colonists to St John River, Annapolis, Port Roseway, and Fort Cumberland. By
August 23 John Parr, the governor of Nova Scotia, wrote that 'upward of
12,000 souls have already arrived from New York,' and that as many more were
expected. By the end of September he estimated that 18,000 had arrived, and
stated that 10,000 more were still to come. By the end of the year he
computed the total immigration to have amounted to 30,000. As late as
January 15, 1784, the refugees were still arriving. On that date Governor
Parr wrote to Lord North announcing the arrival of 'a considerable number of
Refugee families, who must be provided for in and about the town at
extraordinary expence, as at this season of the year I cannot send them into
the country.' 'I cannot,' he added, 'better describe the wretched condition
of these people than by inclosing your lordship a list of those just arrived
in the Clinton transport, destitute of almost everything, chiefly women and
children, all still on board, as I have not yet been able to find any sort
of place for them, and the cold setting in severe.' There is a tradition in
Halifax that the cabooses had to be taken off the ships, and ranged along
the principal street, in order to shelter these unfortunates during the
winter.

New York was evacuated by
the British troops on November 25, 1783. Sir Guy Carleton did not withdraw
from the city until he was satisfied that every person who desired the
protection of the British flag was embarked on the boats. During the latter
half of the year Carleton was repeatedly requested by Congress to fix some
precise limit to his occupation of New York. He replied briefly, but
courteously, that he was doing the best he could, and that no man could do
more. When Congress objected that the Loyalists were not included in the
agreement with regard to evacuation, Carleton replied that he held opposite
views; and that in any case it was a point of honour with him that no troops
should embark until the last person who claimed his protection should be
safely on board a British ship. As time went on, his replies to Congress
grew shorter and more incisive. On being requested to name an outside date
for the evacuation of the city, he declared that he could not even guess
when the last ship would be loaded, but that he was resolved to remain until
it was. He pointed out, moreover, that the more the uncontrolled violence of
their citizens drove refugees to his protection, the longer would evacuation
be delayed. 'I should show,' he said, 'an indifference to the feelings of
humanity, as well as to the honour and interest of the nation whom I serve,
to leave any of the Loyalists that are desirous to quit the country, a prey
to the violence they conceive they have so much cause to apprehend.'

After the evacuation of New
York, therefore, the number of refugee Loyalists who came to Nova Scotia was
small and insignificant. In 1784 and 1785 there arrived a few persons who
had tried to take up the thread of their former life in the colonies, but
had given up the attempt. And in August 1784 the Sally transport from London
cast anchor at Halifax with three hundred destitute refugees on board. 'As
if there was not a sufficiency of such distress'd objects already in this
country,' wrote Edward Winslow from Halifax, 'the good people of England
have collected a whole ship load of all kinds of vagrants from the streets
of London, and sent them out to Nova Scotia. Great numbers died on the
passage of various disorders—the miserable remnant are landed here and have
now no covering but tents. Such as are able to crawl are begging for a
proportion of provisions at my door.'

But the increase of
population in Nova Scotia from immigration during the years immediately
following 1783 was partly counterbalanced by the defections from the
province. Many of the refugees quailed before the prospect of carving out a
home in the wilderness. 'It is, I think, the roughest land I ever saw'; 'I
am totally discouraged'; 'I am sick of this Province'—such expressions as
these abound in the journals and diaries of the settlers. There were
complaints that deception had been practised. 'All our golden promises,'
wrote a Long Island Loyalist, 'are vanished in smoke. We were taught to
believe this place was not barren and foggy as had been represented, but we
find it ten times worse. We have nothing but his Majesty's rotten pork and
unbaked flour to subsist on… It is the most inhospitable clime that ever
mortal set foot on.' At first there was great distress among the refugees.
The immigration of 1783 had at one stroke trebled the population of Nova
Scotia; and the resources of the province were inadequate to meet the demand
on them. 'Nova Scarcity' was the nickname for the province invented by a New
England wit. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that some who
had set their hand to the plough turned back. Some of them went to Upper
Canada; some to England; some to the states from which they had come; for
within a few years the fury of the anti-Loyalist feeling died down, and not
a few Loyalists took advantage of this to return to the place of their
birth.

The most careful analysis
of the Loyalist immigration into the Maritime Provinces has placed the total
number of immigrants at about 35,000. These were in settlements scattered
broadcast over the face of the map. There was a colony of 3,000 in Cape
Breton, which afforded an ideal field for settlement, since before 1783 the
governor of Nova Scotia had been precluded from granting lands there. In
1784 Cape Breton was erected into a separate government, with a
lieutenant-governor of its own; and settlers flocked into it from Halifax,
and even from Canada. Abraham Cuyler, formerly mayor of Albany, led a
considerable number down the St Lawrence and through the Gulf to Cape
Breton. On the mainland of Nova Scotia there were settlements at Halifax, at
Shelburne, at Fort Cumberland, at Annapolis and Digby; at Port Mouton, and
at other places. In what is now New Brunswick there was a settlement at
Passamaquoddy Bay, and there were other settlements on the St John river
extending from the mouth up past what is now the city of Fredericton. In
Prince Edward Island, then called the Island of St John, there was a
settlement which is variously estimated in size, but which was comparatively
unimportant.

The most interesting of
these settlements was that at Shelburne, which is situated at the south-west
corner of Nova Scotia, on one of the finest harbours of the Atlantic
seaboard. The name of the harbour was originally Port Razoir, but this was
corrupted by the English settlers into Port Roseway. The place had been
settled previous to 1783. In 1775 Colonel Alexander McNutt, a notable figure
of the pre-Loyalist days in Nova Scotia, had obtained a grant of 100,000
acres about the harbour, and had induced about a dozen Scottish and Irish
families to settle there. This settlement he had dignified with the name of
New Jerusalem. In a short time, however, New Jerusalem languished and died,
and when the Loyalists arrived in May 1783, the only inhabitants of the
place were two or three fishermen and their families. It would have been
well if the Loyalists had listened to the testimony of one of these men,
who, when he was asked how he came to be there, replied that 'poverty had
brought him there, and poverty had kept him there.'

The project of settling the
shores of Port Roseway had its birth in the autumn of 1782, when one hundred
and twenty Loyalist families, whose attention had been directed to that part
of Nova Scotia by a friend in Massachusetts, banded together with the object
of emigrating thither. They first appointed a committee of seven to make
arrangements for their removal; and, a few weeks later, they commissioned
two members of the association, Joseph Pynchon and James Dole, to go to
Halifax and lay before Governor Parr their desires and intentions. Pynchon
and Dole, on their arrival at Halifax, had an interview with the governor,
and obtained from him very satisfactory arrangements. The governor agreed to
give the settlers the land about Port Roseway which they desired. He
promised them that surveyors should be sent to lay out the grants, that
carpenters and a supply of 400,000 feet of lumber should be furnished for
building their houses, that for the first year at least the settlers should
receive army rations, and that they should be free for ever from impressment
in the British Navy. All these promises were made on the distinct
understanding that they should interfere in no way with the claims of the
Loyalists on the British government for compensation for losses sustained in
the war. Elated by the reception they had received from the governor, the
agents wrote home enthusiastic accounts of the prospects of the venture.
Pynchon even hinted that the new town would supersede Halifax. 'Much talk is
here,' he wrote, 'of capital of Province… Halifax can't but be sensible that
Port Roseway, if properly attended to in encouraging settlers of every
denomination, will have much the advantage of all supplies from the Bay of
Fundy and westward. What the consequence will be time only will reveal.'
Many persons at Halifax, wrote Pynchon, prophesied that the new settlement
would dwindle, and recommended the shore of the Bay of Fundy or the banks of
the river St John in preference to Port Roseway; but Pynchon attributed
their fears to jealousy. A few years' experience must have convinced him
that his suspicions were ill-founded.

The first instalment of
settlers, about four thousand in number, arrived in May 1783. They found
nothing but the virgin wilderness confronting them. But they set to work
with a will to clear the land and build their houses. 'As soon as we had set
up a kind of tent,' wrote the Rev. Jonathan Beecher in his Journal, 'we
knelt down, my wife and I and my two boys, and kissed the dear ground and
thanked God that the flag of England floated there, and resolved that we
would work with the rest to become again prosperous and happy.' By July 11
the work of clearing had been so far advanced that it became possible to
allot the lands. The town had been laid out in five long parallel streets,
with other streets crossing them at right angles. Each associate was given a
town lot fronting on one of these streets, as well as a water lot facing the
harbour, and a fifty-acre farm in the surrounding country. With the aid of
the government artisans, the wooden houses were rapidly run up; and in a
couple of months a town sprang up where before had been the forest and some
fishermen's huts.

At the end of July Governor
Parr paid the town a visit, and christened it, curiously enough, with the
name of Shelburne, after the British statesman who was responsible for the
Peace of Versailles. The occasion was one of great ceremony. His Excellency,
as he landed from the sloopSophie, was saluted by the booming of cannon from
the ships and from the shore. He proceeded up the main street, through a
lane of armed men. At the place appointed for his reception he was met by
the magistrates and principal citizens, and presented with an address. In
the evening there was a dinner given by Captain Mowat on board the Sophie;
and the next evening there was another dinner at the house of Justice
Robertson, followed by a ball given by the citizens, which was 'conducted
with the greatest festivity and decorum,' and 'did not break up till five
the next morning.' Parr was delighted with Shelburne, and wrote to Sir Guy
Carleton, 'From every appearance I have not a doubt but that it will in a
short time become the most flourishing Town for trade of any in this part of
the world, and the country will for agriculture.'

For a few years it looked
as though Shelburne was not going to belie these hopes. The autumn of 1783
brought a considerable increase to its population; and in 1784 it seems to
have numbered no less than ten thousand souls, including the suburb of
Burchtown, in which most of the negro refugees in New York had been settled.
It became a place of business and fashion. There was for a time an extensive
trade in fish and lumber with Great Britain and the West Indies. Ship-yards
were built, from which was launched the first ship built in Nova Scotia
after the British occupation. Shops, taverns, churches, coffee-houses,
sprang up. At one time no less than three newspapers were published in the
town. The military were stationed there, and on summer evenings the military
band played on the promenade near the bridge. On election day the main
street was so crowded that 'one might have walked on the heads of the
people.'

Then Shelburne fell into
decay. It appeared that the region was ill-suited for farming and grazing,
and was not capable of supporting so large a population. The whale fishery
which the Shelburne merchants had established in Brazilian waters proved a
failure. The regulations of the Navigation Acts thwarted their attempts to
set up a coasting trade. Failure dogged all their enterprises, and soon the
glory of Shelburne departed. It became like a city of the dead. 'The
houses,' wrote Haliburton, 'were still standing though untenanted: It had
all the stillness and quiet of a moonlight scene. It was difficult to
imagine it was deserted. The idea of repose more readily suggested itself
than decay. All was new and recent. Seclusion, and not death or removal,
appeared to be the cause of the absence of inhabitants.' The same
eye-witness of Shelburne's ruin described the town later:

The houses, which had been
originally built of wood, had severally disappeared. Some had been taken to
pieces and removed to Halifax or St John; others had been converted into
fuel, and the rest had fallen a prey to neglect and decomposition. The
chimneys stood up erect, and marked the spot around which the social circle
had assembled; and the blackened fireplaces, ranged one above another,
bespoke the size of the tenement and the means of its owner. In some places
they had sunk with the edifice, leaving a heap of ruins, while not a few
were inclining to their fall, and awaiting the first storm to repose again
in the dust that now covered those who had constructed them. Hundreds of
cellars with their stone walls and granite partitions were everywhere to be
seen like uncovered monuments of the dead. Time and decay had done their
work. All that was perishable had perished, and those numerous vaults spoke
of a generation that had passed away for ever, and without the aid of an
inscription, told a tale of sorrow and of sadness that overpowered the
heart.

Alas for the dreams of the
Pynchons and the Parrs! Shelburne is now a quaint and picturesque town; but
it is not the city which its projectors planned.

CHAPTER VII

THE BIRTH OF NEW BRUNSWICK

When Governor Parr wrote to
Sir Guy Carleton, commending in such warm terms the advantages of Shelburne,
he took occasion at the same time to disparage the country about the river
St John. 'I greatly fear,' he wrote, 'the soil and fertility of that part of
this province is overrated by people who have explored it partially. I wish
it may turn out otherwise, but have my fears that there is scarce good land
enough for them already sent there.'

How Governor Parr came to
make so egregious a mistake with regard to the comparative merits of the
Shelburne districts and those of the St John river it is difficult to
understand. Edward Winslow frankly accused him of jealousy of the St John
settlements. Possibly he was only too well aware of the inadequacy of the
preparations made to receive the Loyalists at the mouth of the St John, and
wished to divert the stream of immigration elsewhere. At any rate his
opinion was in direct conflict with the unanimous testimony of the agents
sent to report on the land. Botsford, Cummings, and Hauser had reported:
'The St John is a fine river, equal in magnitude to the Connecticut or
Hudson. At the mouth of the river is a fine harbour, accessible at all
seasons of the year—never frozen or obstructed by ice… There are many
settlers along the river upon the interval land, who get their living
easily. The interval lies on the river, and is a most fertile soil, annually
matured by the overflowing of the river, and produces crops of all kinds
with little labour, and vegetables in the greatest perfection, parsnips of
great length etc.' Later Lieutenant-Colonel Isaac Allen and Edward Winslow,
the muster-master-general of the provincial forces, were sent up as agents
for the Loyalist regiments in New York, and they explored the river for one
hundred and twenty miles above its mouth. 'We have returned,' wrote Winslow
after his trip, 'delighted beyond expression.'

Governor Parr's fears,
therefore, had little effect on the popularity of the St John river
district. In all, no less than ten thousand people settled on the north side
of the Bay of Fundy in 1783. These came, in the main, in three divisions.
With the spring fleet arrived about three thousand people; with the summer
fleet not quite two thousand; and with the autumn fleet well over three
thousand. Of those who came in the spring and summer most were civilian
refugees; but of those who arrived in the autumn nearly all were disbanded
soldiers. Altogether thirteen distinct corps settled on the St John river.
There were the King's American Dragoons, De Lancey's First and Second
Battalions, the New Jersey Volunteers, the King's American Regiment, the
Maryland Loyalists, the 42nd Regiment, the Prince of Wales American
Regiment, the New York Volunteers, the Royal Guides and Pioneers, the
Queen's Rangers, the Pennsylvania Loyalists, and Arnold's American Legion.
All these regiments were reduced, of course, to a fraction of their original
strength, owing to the fact that numbers of their men had been discharged in
New York, and that many of the officers had gone to England. But
nevertheless, with their women and children, their numbers were not far from
four thousand.

The arrangements which the
government of Nova Scotia had made for the reception of this vast army of
people were sadly inadequate. In the first place there was an unpardonable
delay in the surveying and allotment of lands. This may be partly explained
by the insufficient number of surveyors at the disposal of the governor, and
by the tedious and difficult process of escheating lands already granted;
but it is impossible not to convict the governor and his staff of want of
foresight and expedition in making arrangements and carrying them into
effect. When Joseph Aplin arrived at Parrtown, as the settlement at the
mouth of the river was for a short time called, he found 1,500 frame houses
and 400 log huts erected, but no one had yet received a title to the land on
which his house was built. The case of the detachment of the King's American
Dragoons who had settled near the mouth of the river was particularly hard.
They had arrived in advance of the other troops, and had settled on the west
side of the harbour of St John, in what Edward Winslow described as 'one of
the pleasantest spots I ever beheld.' They had already made considerable
improvements on their lands, when word came that the government had
determined to reserve the lands about the mouth of the river for the
refugees, and to allot blocks of land farther up the river to the various
regiments of provincial troops. When news of this decision reached the
officers of the provincial regiments, there was great indignation. 'This is
so notorious a forfeiture of the faith of government,' wrote Colonel De
Lancey to Edward Winslow, 'that it appears to me almost incredible, and yet
I fear it is not to be doubted. Could we have known this a little earlier it
would have saved you the trouble of exploring the country for the benefit of
a people you are not connected with. In short it is a subject too
disagreeable to say more upon.' Winslow, who was hot-headed, talked openly
about the provincials defending the lands on which they had 'squatted.' But
protests were in vain; and the King's American Dragoons were compelled to
abandon their settlement, and to remove up the river to the district of
Prince William. When the main body of the Loyalist regiments arrived in the
autumn they found that the blocks of land assigned to them had not yet been
surveyed. Of their distress and perplexity there is a picture in one of
Edward Winslow's letters.

I saw [he says] all those
Provincial Regiments, which we have so frequently mustered, landing in this
inhospitable climate, in the month of October, without shelter, and without
knowing where to find a place to reside. The chagrin of the officers was not
to me so truly affecting as the poignant distress of the men. Those
respectable sergeants of Robinson's, Ludlow's, Cruger's, Fanning's,
etc.—once hospitable yeomen of the country—were addressing me in language
which almost murdered me as I heard it. 'Sir, we have served all the war,
your honour is witness how faithfully. We were promised land; we expected
you had obtained it for us. We like the country—only let us have a spot of
our own, and give us such kind of regulations as will hinder bad men from
injuring us.'

Many of these men had
ultimately to go up the river more than fifty miles past what is now
Fredericton.

A second difficulty was
that food and building materials supplied by government proved inadequate.
At first the settlers were given lumber and bricks and tools to build their
houses, but the later arrivals, who had as a rule to go farthest up the
river, were compelled to find their building materials in the forest. Even
the King's American Dragoons, evicted from their lands on the harbour of St
John, were ordered to build their huts 'without any public expence.' Many
were compelled to spend the winter in tents banked up with snow; others
sheltered themselves in huts of bark. The privations and sufferings which
many of the refugees suffered were piteous. Some, especially among the women
and children, died from cold and exposure and insufficient food. In the
third place there was great inequality in the area of the lands allotted.
When the first refugees arrived, it was not expected that so many more would
follow; and consequently the earlier grants were much larger in size than
the later. In Parrtown a town lot at length shrank in size to one-sixteenth
of what it had originally been. There was doubtless also some favouritism
and respect of persons in the granting of lands. At any rate the inequality
of the grants caused a great many grievances among a certain class of
refugees. Chief Justice Finucane of Nova Scotia was sent by Governor Parr to
attempt to smooth matters out; but his conduct seemed to accentuate the
ill-feeling and alienate from the Nova Scotia authorities the good-will of
some of the better class of Loyalists.

It was not surprising,
under these circumstances, that Governor Parr and the officers of his
government should have become very unpopular on the north side of the Bay of
Fundy. Governor Parr was himself much distressed over the ill-feeling
against him among the Loyalists; and it should be explained that his failure
to satisfy them did not arise from unwillingness to do anything in his power
to make them comfortable. The trouble was that his executive ability had not
been sufficient to cope with the serious problems confronting him. Out of
the feeling against Governor Parr arose an agitation to have the country
north of the Bay of Fundy removed from his jurisdiction altogether, and
erected into a separate government. This idea of the division of the
province had been suggested by Edward Winslow as early as July 1783: 'Think
what multitudes have and will come here, and then judge whether it must not
from the nature of things immediately become a separate government.' There
were good reasons why such a change should be made. The distance of Parrtown
from Halifax made it very difficult and tedious to transact business with
the government.' and the Halifax authorities, being old inhabitants, were
not in complete sympathy with the new settlers. The erection of a new
province, moreover, would provide offices for many of the Loyalists who were
pressing their claims for place on the government at home. The settlers,
therefore, brought their influence to bear on the Imperial authorities,
through their friends in London; and in the summer of 1784 they succeeded in
effecting the division they desired, in spite of the opposition of Governor
Parr and the official class at Halifax. Governor Parr, indeed, had a narrow
escape from being recalled.

The new province, which it
was intended at first to call New Ireland, but which was eventually called
New Brunswick, was to include all that part of Nova Scotia north of a line
running across the isthmus from the mouth of the Missiquash river to its
source, and thence across to the nearest part of Baie Verte. This boundary
was another triumph for the Loyalists, as it placed in New Brunswick Fort
Cumberland and the greater part of Cumberland county. The government of the
province was offered first to General Fox, who had been in command at
Halifax in 1783, and then to General Musgrave; but was declined by both. It
was eventually accepted by Colonel Thomas Carleton, a brother of Sir Guy
Carleton, by whom it was held for over thirty years. The chief offices of
government fell to Loyalists who were in London. The secretary of the
province was the Rev. Jonathan Odell, a witty New Jersey divine, who had
been secretary to Sir Guy Carleton in New York. It is interesting to note
that Odell's son, the Hon. W. F. Odell, was secretary of the province after
him, and that between them they held the office for two-thirds of a century.
The chief justice was a former judge of the Supreme Court of New York; the
other judges were retired officers of regiments who had fought in the war.
The attorney-general was Jonathan Bliss, of Massachusetts; and the
solicitor-general was Ward Chipman, the friend and correspondent of Edward
Winslow. Winslow himself, whose charming letters throw such a flood of light
on the settlement of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, was a member of the
council. New Brunswick was indeed par excellence the Loyalist province.

The new governor arrived at
Parrtown on November 21, 1784, and was immediately presented with an
enthusiastic address of welcome by the inhabitants. They described
themselves as 'a number of oppressed and insulted Loyalists,' and added that
they had formerly been freemen, and again hoped to be so under his
government. Next spring the governor granted to Parrtown incorporation as a
city under the name of St John. The name Parrtown had been given, it
appears, at the request of Governor Parr himself, who explained
apologetically that the suggestion had arisen out of 'female vanity'; and in
view of Governor Parr's unpopularity, the change of name was very welcome.
At the same time, however, Colonel Carleton greatly offended the people of
St John by removing the capital of the province up the river to St Anne's,
to which he gave the name Fredericktown (Fredericton) in honour of the Duke
of York.

On October 15, 1785, writs
were issued for the election of members to serve in a general assembly. The
province was divided into eight counties, among which were apportioned
twenty-six members. The right to vote was given by Governor Carleton to all
males of twenty-one years of age who had been three months in the province,
the object of this very democratic franchise being to include in the voting
list settlers who were clearing their lands, but had not yet received their
grants. The elections were held in November, and lasted for fifteen days.
They passed off without incident, except in the city of St John. There a
struggle took place which throws a great deal of light on the bitterness of
social feeling among the Loyalists. The inhabitants split into two parties,
known as the Upper Cove and the Lower Cove. The Upper Cove represented the
aristocratic element, and the Lower Cove the democratic. For some time class
feeling had been growing; it had been aroused by the attempt of fifty-five
gentlemen of New York to obtain for themselves, on account of their social
standing and services during the war, grants of land in Nova Scotia of five
thousand acres each; and it had been fanned into flame by the inequality in
the size of the lots granted in St John itself. Unfortunately, among the six
Upper Cove candidates in St John there were two officers of the government,
Jonathan Bliss and Ward Chipman; and thus the struggle took on the
appearance of one between government and opposition candidates. The election
was bitterly contested, under the old method of open voting; and as it
proceeded it became clear that the Lower Cove was polling a majority of the
votes. The defeat of the government officers, it was felt, would be such a
calamity that at the scrutiny Sheriff Oliver struck off over eighty votes,
and returned the Upper Cove candidates. The election was protested, but the
House of Assembly refused, on a technicality, to upset the election. A
strangely ill-worded and ungrammatical petition to have the assembly
dissolved was presented to the governor by the Lower Cove people, but
Governor Carleton refused to interfere, and the Upper Cove candidates kept
their seats. The incident created a great deal of indignation in St John,
and Ward Chipman and Jonathan Bliss were not able for many years to obtain a
majority in that riding.

It is evident from these
early records that, while there were members of the oldest and most famous
families in British America among the Loyalists of the Thirteen Colonies,
the majority of those who came to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and especially
to Upper Canada, were people of very humble origin. Of the settlers in Nova
Scotia, Governor Parr expressed his regret 'that there is not a sufficient
proportion of men of education and abilities among the present adventurers.'
The election in St John was a sufficient evidence of the strength of the
democratic element there; and their petition to Governor Carleton is a
sufficient evidence of their illiteracy. Some of the settlers assumed
pretensions to which they were not entitled. An amusing case is that of
William Newton. This man had been the groom of the Honourable George Hanger,
a major in the British Legion during the war. Having come to Nova Scotia, he
began to pay court to a wealthy widow, and introduced himself to her by
affirming 'that he was particularly connected with the hono'ble Major
Hanger, and that his circumstances were rather affluent, having served in a
money-making department, and that he had left a considerable property behind
him.' The widow applied to Edward Winslow, who assured her that Mr Newton
had indeed been connected—very closely—with the Honourable Major Hanger, and
that he had left a large property behind him. 'The nuptials were immediately
celebrated with great pomp, and Mr Newton is at present,' wrote Winslow, 'a
gentleman of consideration in Nova Scotia.'

During 1785 and subsequent
years, the work of settlement went on rapidly in New Brunswick. There was
hardship and privation at first, and up to 1792 some indigent settlers
received rations from the government. But astonishing progress was made.
'The new settlements of the Loyalists,' wrote Colonel Thomas Dundas, who
visited New Brunswick in the winter of 1786-87, 'are in a thriving way.'
Apparently, however, he did not think highly of the industry of the
disbanded soldiers, for he avowed that 'rum and idle habits contracted
during the war are much against them.' But he paid a compliment to the
half-pay officers. 'The half-pay provincial officers,' he wrote, 'are
valuable settlers, as they are enabled to live well and improve their
lands.'

It took some time for the
province to settle down. Many who found their lands disappointing moved to
other parts of the province; and after 1790 numbers went to Upper Canada.
But gradually the settlers adjusted themselves to their environment, and New
Brunswick entered on that era of prosperity which has been hers ever since.

CHAPTER VIII

IN PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND

Not many Loyalists found
their way to Prince Edward Island, or, as it was called at the time of the
American Revolution, the Island of St John. Probably there were not many
more than six hundred on the island at any one time. But the story of these
immigrants forms a chapter in itself. Elsewhere the refugees were well and
loyally treated. In Nova Scotia and Quebec the English officials strove to
the best of their ability, which was perhaps not always great, to make
provision for them. But in Prince Edward Island they were the victims of
treachery and duplicity.

Prince Edward Island was in
1783 owned by a number of large landed proprietors. When it became known
that the British government intended to settle the Loyalists in Nova Scotia,
these proprietors presented a petition to Lord North, declaring their desire
to afford asylum to such as would settle on the island. To this end they
offered to resign certain of their lands for colonization, on condition that
the government abated the quit-rents. This petition was favourably received
by the government, and a proclamation was issued promising lands to settlers
in Prince Edward Island on terms similar to those granted to settlers in
Nova Scotia and Quebec.

Encouraged by the liberal
terms held forth, a number of Loyalists went to the island direct from New
York, and a number went later from Shelburne, disappointed by the prospects
there. In June 1784 a muster of Loyalists on the island was taken, which
showed a total of about three hundred and eighty persons, and during the
remainder of the year a couple of hundred went from Shelburne. At the end of
1784, therefore, it is safe to assume that there were nearly six hundred on
the island, or about one-fifth of the total population.

These refugees found great
difficulty in obtaining the grants of land promised to them. They were
allowed to take up their residence on certain lands, being assured that
their titles were secure; and then, after they had cleared the lands,
erected buildings, planted orchards, and made other improvements, they were
told that their titles lacked validity, and they were forced to move.
Written title-deeds were withheld on every possible pretext, and when they
were granted they were found to contain onerous conditions out of harmony
with the promises made. The object of the proprietors, in inflicting these
persecutions, seems to have been to force the settlers to become tenants
instead of freeholders. Even Colonel Edmund Fanning, the Loyalist
lieutenant-governor, was implicated in this conspiracy. Fanning was one of
the proprietors in Township No. 50. The settlers in this township, being
unable to obtain their grants, resolved to send a remonstrance to the
British government, and chose as their representative one of their number
who had known Lord Cornwallis during the war, hoping through him to obtain
redress. This agent was on the point of leaving for England, when news of
his intention reached Colonel Fanning. The ensuing result was as prompt as
it was significant: within a week afterwards nearly all the Loyalists in
Township No. 50 had obtained their grants.

Others, however, did not
have friends in high places, and were unable to obtain redress. The minutes
of council which contained the records of many of the allotments were not
entered in the regular Council Book, but were kept on loose sheets; and thus
the unfortunate settlers were not able to prove by the Council Book that
their lands had been allotted them. When the rough minutes were discovered
years later, they were found to bear evidence, in erasures and the use of
different inks, of having been tampered with.

For seventy-five years the
Loyalists continued to agitate for justice. As early as 1790 the island
legislature passed an act empowering the governor to give grants to those
who had not yet received them from the proprietors. But this measure did not
entirely redress the grievances, and after a lapse of fifty years a petition
of the descendants of the Loyalists led to further action in the matter. In
1840 a bill was passed by the House of Assembly granting relief to the
Loyalists, but was thrown out by the Legislative Council. As late as 1860
the question was still troubling the island politics. In that year a land
commission was appointed, which reported that there were Loyalists who still
had claims on the local government, and recommended that free grants should
be made to such as could prove that their fathers had been attracted to the
island under promises which had never been fulfilled.

Such is the unlovely story
of how the Loyalists were persecuted in the Island of St John, under the
British flag.

CHAPTER IX

THE LOYALISTS IN QUEBEC

It was a tribute to the
stability of British rule in the newly-won province of Quebec that at the
very beginning of the Revolutionary War loyal refugees began to flock across
the border. As early as June 2, 1774, Colonel Christie, stationed at St
Johns on the Richelieu, wrote to Sir Frederick Haldimand at Quebec notifying
him of the arrival of immigrants; and it is interesting to note that at that
early date he already complained of 'their unreasonable expectations.' In
the years 1775 and 1776 large bodies of persecuted Loyalists from the Mohawk
valley came north with Sir John Johnson and Colonel Butler; and in these
years was formed in Canada the first of the Loyalist regiments. It was not,
however, until the defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga in 1778 that the full tide
of immigration set in. Immediately thereafter Haldimand wrote to Lord George
Germain, under date of October 14, 1778, reporting the arrival of 'loyalists
in great distress,' seeking refuge from the revolted provinces. Haldimand
lost no time in making provision for their reception. He established a
settlement for them at Machiche, near Three Rivers, which he placed under
the superintendence of a compatriot and a protege of his named Conrad Gugy.
The captains of militia in the neighbourhood were ordered to help build
barracks for the refugees, provisions were secured from the merchants at
Three Rivers, and everything in reason was done to make the unfortunates
comfortable. By the autumn of 1778 there were in Canada, at Machiche and
other places, more than one thousand refugees, men, women, and children,
exclusive of those who had enlisted in the regiments. Including the troops,
probably no less than three thousand had found their way to Canada.

With the conclusion of
peace came a great rush to the north. The resources of government were
strained to the utmost to provide for the necessities of the thousands who
flocked over the border-line. At Chambly, St Johns, Montreal, Sorel,
Machiche, Quebec, officers of government were stationed to dole out
supplies. At Quebec alone in March 1784 one thousand three hundred and
thirty-eight 'friends of government' were being fed at the public expense.
At Sorel a settlement was established similar to that at Machiche. The
seigneury of Sorel had been purchased by the government in 1780 for military
purposes, and when the war was over it was turned into a Loyalist reserve,
on which huts were erected and provisions dispensed. In all, there must have
been nearly seven thousand Loyalists in the province of Quebec in the winter
of 1783-84.

Complete details are
lacking with regard to the temporary encampments in which the Loyalists were
hived; but there are evidences that they were not entirely satisfied with
the manner in which they were looked after. One of the earliest of Canadian
county histories, [Footnote: Dundas, or a Sketch of Canadian History, by
James Croil, Montreal, 1861.] a book partly based on traditionary sources,
has some vague tales about the cruelty and malversation practised by a
Frenchman under whom the Loyalists were placed at 'Mishish.' 'Mishish' is
obviously a phonetic spelling of Machiche, and 'the Frenchman' is probably
Conrad Gugy. Some letters in the Dominion Archives point in the same
direction. Under date of April 29, the governor's secretary writes to
Stephen De Lancey, the inspector of the Loyalists, referring to 'the uniform
discontent of the Loyalists at Machiche.' The discontent, he explains, is
excited by a few ill-disposed persons. 'The sickness they complain of has
been common throughout the province, and should have lessened rather than
increased the consumption of provisions.' A Loyalist who writes to the
governor, putting his complaints on paper, is assured that 'His Excellency
is anxious to do everything in his power for the Loyalists, but if what he
can do does not come up to the expectation of him and those he represents,
His Excellency gives the fullest permission to them to seek redress in such
manner as they shall think best.'

What degree of justice
there was in the complaints of the refugees it is now difficult to
determine. No doubt some of them were confirmed grumblers, and many of them
had what Colonel Christie called 'unreasonable expectations.' Nothing is
more certain than that Sir Frederick Haldimand spared no effort to
accommodate the Loyalists. On the other hand, it would be rash to assert
that in the confusion which then reigned there were no grievances of which
they could justly complain.

In the spring and summer of
1784 the great majority of the refugees within the limits of the province of
Quebec were removed to what was afterwards known as Upper Canada. But some
remained, and swelled the number of the 'old subjects' in the French
province. Considerable settlements were made at two places. One of these was
Sorel, where the seigneury that had been bought by the crown was granted out
to the new-comers in lots; the other was in the Gaspe peninsula, on the
shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence and of Chaleur Bay. The seigneury of Sorel
was well peopled, for each grantee received only sixty acres and a town lot,
taking the rest of his allotment in some of the newer settlements. The
settlement in the Gaspe peninsula was more sparse; the chief centre of
population was the tiny fishing village of Paspebiac. In addition to these
settlements, some of the exiles took up land on private seigneuries; these,
however, were not many, for the government discouraged the practice, and
refused supplies to all who did not settle on the king's land. At the
present time, of all these Loyalist groups in the province of Quebec scarce
a trace remains: they have all been swallowed up in the surrounding French
population.

The Eastern Townships in
the province of Quebec were not settled by the United Empire Loyalists. In
1783 Sir Frederick Haldimand set his face like flint against any attempt on
the part of the Loyalists to settle the lands lying along the Vermont
frontier. He feared that a settlement there would prove a permanent thorn in
the flesh of the Americans, and might lead to much trouble and friction. He
wished that these lands should be left unsettled for a time, and that, in
the end, they should be settled by French Canadians 'as an antidote to the
restless New England population.' Some of the more daring Loyalists, in
spite of the prohibition of the governor, ventured to settle on Missisquoi
Bay. When the governor heard of it, he sent orders to the officer commanding
at St Johns that they should be removed as soon as the season should admit
of it; and instructions were given that if any other Loyalists settled
there, their houses were to be destroyed. By these drastic means the
government kept the Eastern Townships a wilderness until after 1791, when
the townships were granted out in free and common socage, and American
settlers began to flock in. But, as will be explained, these later settlers
have no just claim to the appellation of United Empire Loyalists.

CHAPTER X

THE WESTERN SETTLEMENTS

Sir Frederick Haldimand
Offered the Loyalists a wide choice of places in which to settle. He was
willing to make land grants on Chaleur Bay, at Gaspe, on the north shore of
the St Lawrence above Montreal, on the Bay of Quinte, at Niagara, or along
the Detroit river; and if none of these places was suitable, he offered to
transport to Nova Scotia or Cape Breton those who wished to go thither. At
all these places settlements of Loyalists sprang up. That at Niagara grew to
considerable importance, and became after the division of the province in
1791 the capital of Upper Canada. But by far the largest settlement was that
which Haldimand planned along the north shore of the St Lawrence and Lake
Ontario between the western boundary of the government of Quebec and
Cataraqui (now Kingston), east of the Bay of Quinte. Here the great majority
of the Loyalists in Canada were concentrated.

As soon as Haldimand
received instructions from England with regard to the granting of the lands
he gave orders to Major Samuel Holland, surveyor-general of the king's
territories in North America, to proceed with the work of making the
necessary surveys. Major Holland, taking with him as assistants Lieutenants
Kotte and Sutherland and deputy-surveyors John Collins and Patrick McNish,
set out in the early autumn of 1783, and before the winter closed in he had
completed the survey of five townships bordering on the Bay of Quinte. The
next spring his men returned, and surveyed eight townships along the north
bank of the St Lawrence, between the Bay of Quinte and the provincial
boundary. These townships are now distinguished by names, but in 1783-84
they were designated merely by numbers; thus for many years the old
inhabitants referred to the townships of Osnaburg, Williamsburg, and
Matilda, for instance, as the 'third town,' the 'fourth town,' and the
'fifth town.' The surveys were made in great haste, and, it is to be feared,
not with great care; for some tedious lawsuits arose out of the
discrepancies contained in them, and a generation later Robert Gourlay wrote
that 'one of the present surveyors informed me that in running new lines
over a great extent of the province, he found spare room for a whole
township in the midst of those laid out at an early period.' Each township
was subdivided into lots of two hundred acres each, and a town-site was
selected in each case which was subdivided into town lots.

The task of transporting
the settlers from their camping-places at Sorel, Machiche, and St Johns to
their new homes up the St Lawrence was one of some magnitude. General
Haldimand was not able himself to oversee the work; but he appointed Sir
John Johnson as superintendent, and the work of settlement went on under
Johnson's care. On a given day the Loyalists were ordered to strike camp,
and proceed in a body to the new settlements. Any who remained behind
without sufficient excuse had their rations stopped. Bateaux took the
settlers up the St Lawrence, and the various detachments were disembarked at
their respective destinations. It had been decided that the settlers should
be placed on the land as far as possible according to the corps in which
they had served during the war, and that care should be taken to have the
Protestant and Roman Catholic members of a corps settled separately. It was
this arrangement which brought about the grouping of Protestant and Roman
Catholic Scottish Highlanders in Glengarry. The first battalion of the
King's Royal Regiment of New York was settled on the first five townships
west of the provincial boundary. This was Sir John Johnson's regiment, and
most of its members were his Scottish dependants from the Mohawk valley. The
next three townships were settled by part of Jessup's Corps, an offshoot of
Sir John Johnson's regiment. Of the Cataraqui townships the first was
settled by a band of New York Loyalists, many of them of Dutch or German
extraction, commanded by Captain Michael Grass. On the second were part of
Jessup's Corps; on the third and fourth were a detachment of the second
battalion of the King's Royal Regiment of New York, which had been stationed
at Oswego across the lake at the close of the war, a detachment of Rogers's
Rangers, and a party of New York Loyalists under Major Van Alstine. The
parties commanded by Grass and Van Alstine had come by ship from New York to
Quebec after the evacuation of New York in 1783. On the fifth township were
various detachments of disbanded regular troops, and even a handful of
disbanded German mercenaries.

As soon as the settlers had
been placed on the townships to which they had been assigned, they received
their allotments of land. The surveyor was the land agent, and the
allotments were apportioned by each applicant drawing a lot out of a hat.
This democratic method of allotting lands roused the indignation of some of
the officers who had settled with their men. They felt that they should have
been given the front lots, unmindful of the fact that their grants as
officers were from five to ten times as large as the grants which their men
received. Their protests, contained in a letter of Captain Grass to the
governor, roused Haldimand to a display of warmth to which he was as a rule
a stranger. Captain Grass and his associates, he wrote, were to get no
special privileges, 'the most of them who came into the province with him
being, in fact, mechanics, only removed from one situation to practise their
trade in another. Mr Grass should, therefore, think himself very well off to
draw lots in common with the Loyalists.' A good deal of difficulty arose
also from the fact that many allotments were inferior to the rest from an
agricultural point of view; but difficulties of this sort were adjusted by
Johnson and Holland on the spot.

By 1784 nearly all the
settlers were destitute and completely dependent on the generosity of the
British government. They had no effects; they had no money; and in many
cases they were sorely in need of clothes. The way in which Sir Frederick
Haldimand came to their relief is deserving of high praise. If he had
adhered to the letter of his instructions from England, the position of the
Loyalists would have been a most unenviable one. Repeatedly, however,
Haldimand took on his own shoulders the responsibility of ignoring or
disobeying the instructions from England, and trusted to chance that his
protests would prevent the government from repudiating his actions. When the
home government, for instance, ordered a reduction of the rations, Haldimand
undertook to continue them in full; and fortunately for him the home
government, on receipt of his protest, rescinded the order.

The settlers on the Upper
St Lawrence and the Bay of Quinte did not perhaps fare as well as those in
Nova Scotia, or even the Mohawk Indians who settled on the Grand river. They
did not receive lumber for building purposes, and 'bricks for the inside of
their chimneys, and a little assistance of nails,' as did the former; nor
did they receive ploughs and church-bells, as did the latter. For building
lumber they had to wait until saw-mills were constructed; instead of ploughs
they had at first to use hoes and spades, and there were not quite enough
hoes and spades to go round. Still, they did not fare badly. When the
difficulty of transporting things up the St Lawrence is remembered, it is
remarkable that they obtained as much as they did. In the first place they
were supplied with clothes for three years, or until they were able to
provide clothes for themselves. These consisted of coarse cloth for trousers
and Indian blankets for coats. Boots they made out of skins or heavy cloth.
Tools for building were given them: to each family were given an ax and a
hand-saw, though unfortunately the axes were short-handled ship's axes,
ill-adapted to cutting in the forest; to each group of two families were
allotted a whip-saw and a cross-cut saw; and to each group of five families
was supplied a set of tools, containing chisels, augers, draw-knives, etc.
To each group of five families was also allotted 'one fire-lock … intended
for the messes, the pigeon and wildfowl season'; but later on a fire-lock
was supplied to every head of a family. Haldimand went to great trouble in
obtaining seed-wheat for the settlers, sending agents down even into Vermont
and the Mohawk valley to obtain all that was to be had; he declined,
however, to supply stock for the farms, and although eventually he obtained
some cattle, there were not nearly enough cows to go round. In many cases
the soldiers were allowed the loan of the military tents; and everything was
done to have saw-mills and grist-mills erected in the most convenient places
with the greatest possible dispatch. In the meantime small portable
grist-mills, worked by hand, were distributed among the settlers.

Among the papers relating
to the Loyalists in the Canadian Archives there is an abstract of the
numbers of the settlers in the five townships at Cataraqui and the eight
townships on the St Lawrence. There were altogether 1,568 men, 626 women,
1,492 children, and 90 servants, making a total of 3,776 persons. These
were, of course, only the original settlers. As time went on others were
added. Many of the soldiers had left their families in the States behind
them, and these families now hastened to cross the border. A proclamation
had been issued by the British government inviting those Loyalists who still
remained in the States to assemble at certain places along the frontier,
namely, at Isle aux Noix, at Sackett's Harbour, at Oswego, and at Niagara.
The favourite route was the old trail from the Mohawk valley to Oswego,
where was stationed a detachment of the 34th regiment. From Oswego these
refugees crossed to Cataraqui. 'Loyalists,' wrote an officer at Cataraqui in
the summer of 1784, 'are coming in daily across the lake.' To accommodate
these new settlers three more townships had to be mapped out at the west end
of the Bay of Quinte.

For the first few years the
Cataraqui settlers had a severe struggle for existence. Most of them arrived
in 1784, too late to attempt to sow fall wheat; and it was several seasons
before their crops became nearly adequate for food. The difficulties of
transportation up the St Lawrence rendered the arrival of supplies irregular
and uncertain. Cut off as they were from civilization by the St Lawrence
rapids, they were in a much less advantageous position than the great
majority of the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick settlers, who were situated
near the sea-coast. They had no money, and as the government refused to send
them specie, they were compelled to fall back on barter as a means of trade,
with the result that all trade was local and trivial. In the autumn of 1787
the crops failed, and in 1788 famine stalked through the land. There are
many legends about what was known as 'the hungry year.' If we are to believe
local tradition, some of the settlers actually died of starvation. In the
family papers of one family is to be found a story about an old couple who
were saved from starvation only by the pigeons which they were able to knock
over. A member of another family testifies: 'We had the luxury of a cow
which the family brought with them, and had it not been for this domestic
boon, all would have perished in the year of scarcity.' Two hundred acre
lots were sold for a few pounds of flour. A valuable cow, in one case, was
sold for eight bushels of potatoes; a three-year-old horse was exchanged for
half a hundredweight of flour. Bran was used for making cakes; and leeks,
buds of trees, and even leaves, were ground into food.

The summer of 1789,
however, brought relief to the settlers, and though, for many years,
comforts and even necessaries were scarce, yet after 1791, the year in which
the new settlements were erected into the province of Upper Canada, it may
be said that most of the settlers had been placed on their feet. The soil
was fruitful; communication and transportation improved; and metallic
currency gradually found its way into the settlements. When Mrs Simcoe, the
wife of the lieutenant-governor, passed through the country in 1792, she was
struck by the neatness of the farms of the Dutch and German settlers from
the Mohawk valley, and by the high quality of the wheat. 'I observed on my
way thither,' she says in her diary, 'that the wheat appeared finer than any
I have seen in England, and totally free from weeds.' And a few months later
an anonymous English traveller, passing the same way, wrote: 'In so infant a
settlement, it would have been irrational to expect that abundance which
bursts the granaries, and lows in the stalls of more cultivated countries.
There was, however, that kind of appearance which indicated that with
economy and industry, there would be enough.'

Next in size to the
settlements at Cataraqui and on the Upper St Lawrence was the settlement at
Niagara. During the war Niagara had been a haven of refuge for the Loyalists
of Pennsylvania and the frontier districts, just as Oswego and St Johns had
been havens of refuge for the Loyalists of northern and western New York. As
early as 1776 there arrived at Fort George, Niagara, in a starving
condition, five women and thirty-six children, bearing names which are still
to be found in the Niagara peninsula. From that date until the end of the
war refugees continued to come in. Many of these refugees were the families
of the men and officers of the Loyalist troops stationed at Niagara. On
September 27, 1783, for instance, the officer commanding at Niagara reports
the arrival from Schenectady of the wives of two officers of Butler's
Rangers, with a number of children. Some of these people went down the lake
to Montreal; but others remained at the post, and 'squatted' on the land. In
1780 Colonel Butler reports to Haldimand that four or five families have
settled and built houses, and he requests that they be given seed early in
the spring. In 1781 we know that a Loyalist named Robert Land had squatted
on Burlington Bay, at the head of Lake Ontario. In 1783 Lieutenant Tinling
was sent to Niagara to survey lots, and Sergeant Brass of the 84th was sent
to build a saw-mill and a grist-mill. At the same time Butler's Rangers, who
were stationed at the fort, were disbanded; and a number of them were
induced to take up land. They took up land on the west side of the river,
because, although, according to the terms of peace, Fort George was not
given up by the British until 1796, the river was to constitute the boundary
between the two countries. A return of the rise and progress of the
settlement made in May 1784 shows a total of forty-six settlers (that is,
heads of families), with forty-four houses and twenty barns. The return
makes it clear that cultivation had been going on for some time. There were
713 acres cleared, 123 acres sown in wheat, and 342 acres waiting to be
sown; and the farms were very well stocked, there being an average of about
three horses and four or five cows to each settler.

With regard to the
settlement at Detroit, there is not much evidence available. It was
Haldimand's intention at first to establish a large settlement there, but
the difficulties of communication doubtless proved to be insuperable. In the
event, however, some of Butler's Rangers settled there. Captain Bird of the
Rangers applied for and received a grant of land on which he made a
settlement; and in the summer of 1784 we find Captain Caldwell and some
others applying for deeds for the land and houses they occupied. In 1783 the
commanding officer at Detroit reported the arrival from Red Creek of two
men, 'one a Girty, the other McCarty,' who had come to see what
encouragement there was to settle under the British government. They
asserted that several hundred more would be glad to come if sufficient
inducements were offered them, as they saw before them where they were
nothing but persecution. In 1784 Jehu Hay, the British lieutenant-governor
of Detroit, sent in lists of men living near Fort Pitt who were anxious to
settle under the British government if they could get lands, most of them
being men who had served in the Highland and 60th regiments. But it is safe
to assume that no large number of these ever settled near Detroit, for when
Hay arrived in Detroit in the summer of 1784, he found only one Loyalist at
the post itself. There had been for more than a generation a settlement of
French Canadians at Detroit; but it was not until after 1791 that the
English element became at all considerable.

It has been estimated that
in the country above Montreal in 1783 there were ten thousand Loyalists, and
that by 1791 this number had increased to twenty-five thousand. These
figures are certainly too large. Pitt's estimate of the population of Upper
Canada in 1791 was only ten thousand. This is probably much nearer the mark.
The overwhelming majority of these people were of very humble origin.
Comparatively few of the half-pay officers settled above Montreal before
1791; and most of these were, as Haldimand said, 'mechanics, only removed
from one situation to practise their trade in another.' Major Van Alstine,
it appears, was a blacksmith before he came to Canada. That many of the
Loyalists were illiterate is evident from the testimony of the Rev. William
Smart, a Presbyterian clergyman who came to Upper Canada in 1811: 'There
were but few of the U. E. Loyalists who possessed a complete education. He
was personally acquainted with many, especially along the St Lawrence and
Bay of Quinte, and by no means were all educated, or men of judgment; even
the half-pay officers, many of them, had but a limited education.' The
aristocrats of the 'Family Compact' party did not come to Canada with the
Loyalists of 1783; they came, in most cases, after 1791, some of them from
Britain, such as Bishop Strachan, and some of them from New Brunswick and
Nova Scotia, such as the Jarvises and the Robinsons. This fact is one which
serves to explain a great deal in Upper Canadian history.

CHAPTER XI

COMPENSATION AND HONOUR

Throughout the war the
British government had constantly granted relief and compensation to
Loyalists who had fled to England. In the autumn of 1782 the treasury was
paying out to them, on account of losses or services, an annual amount of
40,280 pounds over and above occasional payments of a particular or
extraordinary nature amounting to 17,000 pounds or 18,000 pounds annually.
When peace had been concluded, and it became clear that the Americans had no
intention of making restitution to the Loyalists, the British government
determined to put the payments for their compensation on a more satisfactory
basis.

For this purpose the
Coalition Government of Fox and North appointed in July 1783 a royal
commission 'to inquire into the losses and services of all such persons who
have suffered in their rights, properties, and professions during the late
unhappy dissensions in America, in consequence of their loyalty to His
Majesty and attachment to the British Government.' A full account of the
proceedings of the commission is to be found in theHistorical View of the
Commission for Inquiry into the Losses, Services, and Claims of the American
Loyalists, published in London in 1815 by one of the commissioners, John
Eardley Wilmot. The commission was originally appointed to sit for only two
years; but the task which confronted it was so great that it was found
necessary several times to renew the act under which it was appointed; and
not until 1790 was the long inquiry brought to an end. It was intended at
first that the claims of the men in the Loyalist regiments should be sent in
through their officers; and Sir John Johnson, for instance, was asked to
transmit the claims of the Loyalists settled in Canada. But it was found
that this method did not provide sufficient guarantee against fraudulent and
exorbitant claims; and eventually members of the commission were compelled
to go in person to New York, Nova Scotia, and Canada.

The delay in concluding the
work of the commission caused great indignation. A tract which appeared in
London in 1788 entitled The Claim of the American Loyalists Reviewed and
Maintained upon Incontrovertible Principles of Law and Justice drew a black
picture of the results of the delay:

It is well known that this
delay of justice has produced the most melancholy and shocking events. A
number of sufferers have been driven into insanity and become their own
destroyers, leaving behind them their helpless widows and orphans to subsist
upon the cold charity of strangers. Others have been sent to cultivate the
wilderness for their subsistence, without having the means, and compelled
through want to throw themselves on the mercy of the American States, and
the charity of former friends, to support the life which might have been
made comfortable by the money long since due by the British Government; and
many others with their families are barely subsisting upon a temporary
allowance from Government, a mere pittance when compared with the sum due
them.

Complaints were also made
about the methods of the inquiry. The claimant was taken into a room alone
with the commissioners, was asked to submit a written and sworn statement as
to his losses and services, and was then cross-examined both with regard to
his own losses and those of his fellow claimants. This cross-questioning was
freely denounced as an 'inquisition.'

Grave inconvenience was
doubtless caused in many cases by the delay of the commissioners in making
their awards. But on the other hand it should be remembered that the
commissioners had before them a portentous task. They had to examine between
four thousand and five thousand claims. In most of these the amount of
detail to be gone through was considerable, and the danger of fraud was
great. There was the difficulty also of determining just what losses should
be compensated. The rule which was followed was that claims should be
allowed only for losses of property through loyalty, for loss of offices
held before the war, and for loss of actual professional income. No account
was taken of lands bought or improved during the war, of uncultivated lands,
of property mortgaged to its full value or with defective titles, of damage
done by British troops, or of forage taken by them. Losses due to the fall
in the value of the provincial paper money were thrown out, as were also
expenses incurred while in prison or while living in New York city. Even
losses in trade and labour were discarded. It will be seen that to apply
these rules to thousands of detailed claims, all of which had to be
verified, was not the work of a few days, or even months.

It must be remembered, too,
that during the years from 1783 to 1790 the British government was doing a
great deal for the Loyalists in other ways. Many of the better class
received offices under the crown. Sir John Johnson was appointed
superintendent of the Loyalists in Canada, and then superintendent of Indian
Affairs; Colonel Edmund Fanning was made lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia;
Ward Chipman became solicitor-general of New Brunswick. The officers of the
Loyalist regiments were put on half-pay; and there is evidence that many
were allowed thus to rank as half-pay officers who had no real claim to the
title. 'Many,' said the Rev. William Smart of Brockville, 'were placed on
the list of officers, not because they had seen service, but as the most
certain way of compensating them for losses sustained in the Rebellion'; and
Haldimand himself complained that 'there is no end to it if every man that
comes in is to be considered and paid as an officer.' Then every Loyalist
who wished to do so received a grant of land. The rule was that each field
officer should receive 5,000 acres, each captain 3,000, each subaltern
2,000, and each non-commissioned officer and private 200 acres. This rule
was not uniformly observed, and there was great irregularity in the size of
the grants. Major Van Alstine, for instance, received only 1,200 acres. But
in what was afterwards Upper Canada, 3,200,000 acres were granted out to
Loyalists before 1787. And in addition to all this, the British government
clothed and fed and housed the Loyalists until they were able to provide for
themselves. There were those in Nova Scotia who were receiving rations as
late as 1792. What all this must have cost the government during the years
following 1783 it is difficult to compute. Including the cost of surveys,
official salaries, the building of saw-mills and grist-mills, and such
things, the figures must have run up to several millions of pounds.

When it is remembered that
all this had been already done, it will be admitted to be a proof of the
generosity of the British government that the total of the claims allowed by
the royal commission amounted to 3,112,455 pounds.

The grants varied in size
from 10 pounds, the compensation paid to a common soldier, to 44,500 pounds,
the amount paid to Sir John Johnson. The total outlay on the part of Great
Britain, both during and after the war, on account of the Loyalists, must
have amounted to not less than 6,000,000 pounds, exclusive of the value of
the lands assigned.

With the object possibly of
assuaging the grievances of which the Loyalists complained in connection
with the proceedings of the royal commission, Lord Dorchester (as Sir Guy
Carleton was by that time styled) proposed in 1789 'to put a Marke of Honor
upon the families who had adhered to the unity of the empire, and joined the
Royal Standard in America before the Treaty of Separation in the year 1783.'
It was therefore resolved that all Loyalists of that description were 'to be
distinguished by the letters U. E. affixed to their names, alluding to their
great principle, the unity of the empire.' The land boards were ordered to
preserve a registry of all such persons, 'to the end that their posterity
may be discriminated from future settlers,' and that their sons and
daughters, on coming of age, might receive grants of two hundred acre lots.
Unfortunately, the land boards carried out these instructions in a very
half-hearted manner, and when Colonel John Graves Simcoe became
lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, he found the regulation a dead letter.
He therefore revived it in a proclamation issued at York (now Toronto), on
April 6, 1796, which directed the magistrates to ascertain under oath and to
register the names of all those who by reason of their loyalty to the Empire
were entitled to special distinction and grants of land. A list was compiled
from the land board registers, from the provision lists and muster lists,
and from the registrations made upon oath, which was known as the 'Old U. E.
List'; and it is a fact often forgotten that no one, the names of some of
whose ancestors are not inscribed in that list, has the right to describe
himself as a United Empire Loyalist.

CHAPTER XII

THE AMERICAN MIGRATION

From the first the problem
of governing the settlements above Montreal perplexed the authorities. It
was very early proposed to erect them into a separate province, as New
Brunswick had been erected into a separate province. But Lord Dorchester was
opposed to any such arrangement. 'It appears to me,' he wrote to Lord
Sydney, 'that the western settlements are as yet unprepared for any
organization superior to that of a county.' In 1787, therefore, the country
west of Montreal was divided into four districts, for a time named
Lunenburg, Mecklenburg, Nassau, and Hesse. Lunenburg stretched from the
western boundary of the province of Quebec to the Gananoqui; Mecklenburg,
from the Gananoqui to the Trent, flowing into the Bay of Quinte; Nassau,
from the Trent to a line drawn due north from Long Point on Lake Erie; and
Hesse, from this line to Detroit. We do not know who was responsible for
inflicting these names on a new and unoffending country. Perhaps they were
thought a compliment to the Hanoverian ruler of England. Fortunately they
were soon dropped, and the names Eastern, Midland, Home, and Western were
substituted.

This division of the
settlements proved only temporary. It left the Loyalists under the arbitrary
system of government set up in Quebec by the Quebec Act of 1774, under which
they enjoyed no representative institutions whatever. It was not long before
petitions began to pour in from them asking that they should be granted a
representative assembly. Undoubtedly Lord Dorchester had underestimated the
desire among them for representative institutions. In 1791, therefore, the
country west of the Ottawa river, with the exception of a triangle of land
at the junction of the Ottawa and the St Lawrence, was erected by the
Constitutional Act into a separate province, with the name of Upper Canada;
and this province was granted a representative assembly of fifteen members.

The lieutenant-governor
appointed for the new province was Colonel John Graves Simcoe. During the
war Colonel Simcoe had been the commanding officer of the Queen's Rangers,
which had been largely composed of Loyalists, and he was therefore not
unfitted to govern the new province. He was theoretically under the control
of Lord Dorchester at Quebec; but his relations with Dorchester were
somewhat strained, and he succeeded in making himself virtually independent
in his western jurisdiction. Though he seemed phlegmatic, he possessed a
vigorous and enterprising disposition, and he planned great things for Upper
Canada. He explored the country in search of the best site for a capital;
and it is interesting to know that he had such faith in the future of Upper
Canada that he actually contemplated placing the capital in what was then
the virgin wilderness about the river Thames. He inaugurated a policy of
building roads and improving communications which showed great foresight;
and he entered upon an immigration propaganda, by means of proclamations
advertising free land grants, which brought a great increase of population
to the province.

Simcoe believed that there
were still in the United States after 1791 many people who had remained
loyal at heart to Great Britain, and who were profoundly dissatisfied with
their lot under the new American government. It was his object to attract
these people to Upper Canada by means of his proclamations; and there is no
doubt that he was partly successful. But he also attracted many who had no
other motive in coming to Canada than their desire to obtain free land
grants, and whose attachment to the British crown was of the most recent
origin. These people were freely branded by the original settlers as
'Americans'; and there is no doubt that in many cases the name expressed
their real sympathies.

The War of the Revolution
had hardly been brought to a conclusion when some of the Americans showed a
tendency to migrate into Canada. In 1783, when the American Colonel Willet
was attempting an attack on the British garrison at Oswego, American
traders, with an impudence which was superb, were arriving at Niagara. In
1784 some rebels who had attempted to pose as Loyalists were ejected from
the settlements at Cataraqui. And after Simcoe began to advertise free land
grants to all who would take the oath of allegiance to King George, hundreds
of Americans flocked across the border. The Duc de la Rochefoucauld, a
French emigre who travelled through Upper Canada in 1795, and who has given
us the best account of the province at that time, asserted that there were
in Upper Canada many who falsely profess an attachment to the British
monarch and curse the Government of the Union for the mere purpose of
getting possession of the lands.' 'We met in this excursion,' says La
Rochefoucauld in another place, 'an American family who, with some oxen,
cows, and sheep, were emigrating to Canada. "We come," said they, "to the
governor," whom they did not know, "to see whether he will give us land."
"Aye, aye," the governor replied, "you are tired of the federal government;
you like not any longer to have so many kings; you wish again for your old
father" (it is thus the governor calls the British monarch when he speaks
with Americans); "you are perfectly right; come along, we love such good
Royalists as you are; we will give you land."'

Other testimony is not
lacking. Writing in 1799 Richard Cartwright said, 'It has so happened that a
great portion of the population of that part of the province which extends
from the head of the Bay of Kenty upwards is composed of persons who have
evidently no claim to the appellation of Loyalists.' In some districts it
was a cause of grievance that persons from the States entered the province,
petitioned for lands, took the necessary oaths, and, having obtained
possession of the land, resold it, pocketed the money, and returned to build
up the American Union. As late as 1816 a letter appeared in the
Kingston Gazette in which the complaint is made that 'people who have come
into the country from the States, marry into a family, and obtain a lot of
wild land, get John Ryder to move the landmarks, and instead of a wild lot,
take by force a fine house and barn and orchard, and a well-cultivated farm,
and turn the old Tory (as he is called) out of his house, and all his labor
for thirty years.'

Never at any other time
perhaps have conditions been so favourable in Canada for land-grabbing and
land-speculation as they were then. Owing to the large amount of land
granted to absentee owners, and to the policy of free land grants announced
by Simcoe, land was sold at a very low price. In some cases two hundred acre
lots were sold for a gallon of rum. In 1791 Sir William Pullency, an English
speculator, bought 1,500,000 acres of land in Upper Canada at one shilling
an acre, and sold 700,000 acres later for an average of eight shillings an
acre. Under these circumstances it was not surprising that many Americans,
with their shrewd business instincts, flocked into the country.

It is clear, then, that a
large part of the immigration which took place under Simcoe was not Loyalist
in its character. From this, it must not be understood that the new-comers
were not good settlers. Even Richard Cartwright confessed that they had
'resources in themselves which other people are usually strangers to.' They
compared very favourably with the Loyalists who came from England and the
Maritime Provinces, who were described by Cartwright as 'idle and
profligate.' The great majority of the American settlers became loyal
subjects of the British crown; and it was only when the American army
invaded Canada in 1812, and when William Lyon Mackenzie made a push for
independence in 1837, that the non-Loyalist character of some of the early
immigration became apparent.

CHAPTER XIII

THE LOYALIST IN HIS NEW
HOME

The social history of the
United Empire Loyalists was not greatly different from that of other pioneer
settlers in the Canadian forest. Their homes were such as could have been
seen until recently in many of the outlying parts of the country. In Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick some of the better class of settlers were able to
put up large and comfortable wooden houses, some of which are still
standing. But even there most of them had to be content with primitive
quarters. Edward Winslow was not a poor man, as poverty was reckoned in
those days. Yet he lived in rather meagre style. He described his house at
Granville, opposite Annapolis, as being 'almost as large as my log house,
divided into two rooms, where we are snug as pokers.' Two years later, after
he had made additions to it, he proposed advertising it for sale in the
following terms: 'That elegant House now occupied by the Honourable E. W.,
one of His Majesty's Council for the Province of New Brunswick, consisting
of four beautiful Rooms on the first Floor, highly finished. Also two
spacious lodging chambers in the second story—a capacious dry cellar with
arches &c. &c. &c.' In Upper Canada, owing to the difficulty of obtaining
building materials, the houses of the half-pay officers were even less
pretentious. A traveller passing through the country about Johnstown in 1792
described Sir John Johnson's house as 'a small country lodge, neat, but as
the grounds are only beginning to be cleared, there was nothing of
interest.'

The home of the average
Loyalist was a log-cabin. Sometimes the cabin contained one room, sometimes
two. Its dimensions were as a rule no more than fourteen feet by eighteen
feet, and sometimes ten by fifteen. The roofs were constructed of bark or
small hollowed basswood logs, overlapping one another like tiles. The
windows were as often as not covered not with glass, but with oiled paper.
The chimneys were built of sticks and clay, or rough unmortared stones,
since bricks were not procurable; sometimes there was no chimney, and the
smoke was allowed to find its way out through a hole in the bark roof. Where
it was impossible to obtain lumber, the doors were made of pieces of timber
split into rough boards; and in some cases the hinges and latches were made
of wood. These old log cabins, with the chinks between the logs filled in
with clay and moss, were still to be seen standing in many parts of the
country as late as fifty years ago. Though primitive, they seem to have been
not uncomfortable; and many of the old settlers clung to them long after
they could have afforded to build better. This was doubtless partly due to
the fact that log-houses were exempt from the taxation laid on frame, brick,
and stone structures.

A few of the Loyalists
succeeded in bringing with them to Canada some sticks of furniture or some
family heirlooms. Here and there a family would possess an ancient spindle,
a pair of curiously-wrought fire-dogs, or a quaint pair of hand-bellows. But
these relics of a former life merely served to accentuate the rudeness of
the greater part of the furniture of the settlers. Chairs, benches, tables,
beds, chests, were fashioned by hand from the rough wood. The descendant of
one family has described how the family dinner-table was a large stump, hewn
flat on top, standing in the middle of the floor. The cooking was done at
the open fireplace; it was not until well on in the nineteenth century that
stoves came into common use in Canada.

The clothing of the
settlers was of the most varied description. Here and there was one who had
brought with him the tight knee-breeches and silver-buckled shoes of polite
society. But many had arrived with only what was on their backs; and these
soon found their garments, no matter how carefully darned and patched,
succumb to the effects of time and labour. It was not long before the
settlers learnt from the Indians the art of making clothing out of
deer-skin. Trousers made of this material were found both comfortable and
durable. 'A gentleman who recently died in Sophiasburg at an advanced age,
remembered to have worn a pair for twelve years, being repaired
occasionally, and at the end they were sold for two dollars and a half.'
Petticoats for women were also made of deer-skin. 'My grandmother,' says one
descendant, 'made all sorts of useful dresses with these skins, which were
most comfortable for a country life, and for going through the bush [since
they] could not be torn by the branches.' There were of course, some
articles of clothing which could not readily be made of leather; and very
early the settlers commenced growing flax and raising sheep for their wool.
Home-made linen and clothing of linsey-woolsey were used in the settlements
by high and low alike. It was not until the close of the eighteenth century
that articles of apparel, other than those made at home of flax and wool,
were easily obtainable. A calico dress was a great luxury. Few daughters
expected to have one until it was bought for their wedding-dress. Great
efforts were always made to array the bride in fitting costume; and
sometimes a dress, worn by the mother in other days, amid other scenes, was
brought forth, yellow and discoloured with the lapse of time.

There was little money in
the settlements. What little there was came in pay to the soldiers or the
half-pay officers. Among the greater part of the population, business was
carried on by barter. In Upper Canada the lack of specie was partly overcome
by the use of a kind of paper money. 'This money consists of small squares
of card or paper, on which are printed promissory notes for various sums.
These notes are made payable once a year, generally about the latter end of
September at Montreal. The name of the merchant or firm is subscribed.' This
was merely an extension of the system of credit still in use with country
merchants, but it provided the settlers with a very convenient substitute
for cash. The merchants did not suffer, as frequently this paper money was
lost, and never presented; and cases were known of its use by Indians as
wadding for their flint-locks.

Social instincts among the
settlers were strongly marked. Whenever a family was erecting a house or
barn, the neighbours as a rule lent a helping hand. While the men were
raising barn-timbers and roof-trees, the women gathered about the
quilting-frames or the spinning-wheels. After the work was done, it was
usual to have a festival. The young men wrestled and showed their prowess at
trials of strength; the rest looked on and applauded. In the evening there
was a dance, at which the local musician scraped out tuneless tunes on an
ancient fiddle; and there was of course hearty eating and, it is to be
feared, heavy drinking.

Schools and churches were
few and far between. A number of Loyalist clergy settled both in Nova Scotia
and in Upper Canada, and these held services and taught school in the chief
centres of population. The Rev. John Stuart was, for instance, appointed
chaplain in 1784 at Cataraqui; and in 1786 he opened an academy there, for
which he received government aid. In time other schools sprang up, taught by
retired soldiers or farmers who were incapacitated for other work. The
tuition given in these schools was of the most elementary sort. La
Rochefoucauld, writing of Cataraqui in 1795, says: 'In this district are
some schools, but they are few in number. The children are instructed in
reading and writing, and pay each a dollar a month. One of the masters,
superior to the rest in point of knowledge, taught Latin; but he has left
the school, without being succeeded by another instructor of the same
learning.' 'At seven years of age,' writes the son of a Loyalist family, 'I
was one of those who patronized Mrs Cranahan, who opened a Sylvan Seminary
for the young idea in Adolphustown; from thence, I went to Jonathan Clark's,
and then tried Thomas Morden, lastly William Faulkiner, a relative of the
Hagermans. You may suppose that these graduations to Parnassus was [sic]
carried into effect, because a large amount of knowledge could be obtained.
Not so; for Dilworth's Spelling Book, and the New Testament, were the only
books possessed by these academies.'

The lack of a clergy was
even more marked. When Bishop Mountain visited Upper Canada in 1794, he
found only one Lutheran chapel and two Presbyterian churches between
Montreal and Kingston. At Kingston he found 'a small but decent church,' and
about the Bay of Quinte there were three or four log huts which were used by
the Church of England missionary in the neighbourhood. At Niagara there was
a clergyman, but no church; the services were held in the Freemasons' Hall.
This lack of a regularly-ordained clergy was partly remedied by a number of
itinerant Methodist preachers or 'exhorters.' These men were described by
Bishop Mountain as 'a set of ignorant enthusiasts, whose preaching is
calculated only to perplex the understanding, to corrupt the morals, to
relax the nerves of industry, and dissolve the bands of society.' But they
gained a very strong hold on the Loyalist population; and for a long time
they were familiar figures upon the country roads.

For many years
communications both in New Brunswick and in Upper Canada were mainly by
water. The roads between the settlements were little more than forest paths.
When Colonel Simcoe went to Upper Canada he planned to build a road running
across the province from Montreal to the river Thames, to be called Dundas
Street. He was recalled, however, before the road was completed; and the
project was allowed to fall through. In 1793 an act was passed by the
legislature of Upper Canada 'to regulate the laying out, amending, and
keeping in repair, the public highways and roads.' This threw on the
individual settler the obligation of keeping the road across his lot in good
repair; but the large amount of crown lands and clergy reserves and land
held by speculators throughout the province made this act of little avail.
It was not until 1798 that a road was run from the Bay of Quinte to the head
of Lake Ontario, by an American surveyor named Asa Danforth. But even this
government road was at times impassable; and there is evidence that some
travellers preferred to follow the shore of the lake.

It will be seen from these
notes on social history that the Loyalists had no primrose path. But after
the first grumblings and discontents, poured into the ears of Governor
Haldimand and Governor Parr, they seem to have settled down contentedly to
their lot; and their life appears to have been on the whole happy.
Especially in the winter, when they had some leisure, they seem to have
known how to enjoy themselves.

In the winter season,
nothing is more ardently wished for, by young persons of both sexes, in
Upper Canada, than the setting in of frost, accompanied by a fall of snow.
Then it is, that pleasure commences her reign. The sleighs are drawn out.
Visits are paid, and returned, in all directions. Neither cold, distance, or
badness of roads prove any impediment. The sleighs glide over all obstacles.
It would excite surprise in a stranger to view the open before the
Governor's House on a levee morning, filled with these carriages. A sleigh
would not probably make any great figure in Bond street, whose silken sons
and daughters would probably mistake it for a turnip cart, but in the
Canadas, it is the means of pleasure, and glowing healthful exercise. An
overturn is nothing. It contributes subject matter for conversation at the
next house that is visited, when a pleasant raillery often arises on the
derangement of dress, which the ladies have sustained, and the more than
usual display of graces, which the tumble has occasioned.

This picture, drawn in 1793
by a nameless traveller, is an evidence of the courage and buoyancy of heart
with which the United Empire Loyalists faced the toils and privations of
life in their new home.

Not drooping like poor
fugitives they came
In exodus to our Canadian wilds,
But full of heart and hope, with heads erect
And fearless eyes victorious in defeat.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

It is astonishing how
little documentary evidence the Loyalists left behind them with regard to
their migration. Among those who fled to England there were a few who kept
diaries and journals, or wrote memoirs, which have found their way into
print; and some contemporary records have been published with regard to the
settlements of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. But of the Loyalists who
settled in Upper and Lower Canada there is hardly one who left behind him a
written account of his experiences. The reason for this is that many of them
were illiterate, and those who were literate were so occupied with carving a
home for themselves out of the wilderness that they had neither time nor
inclination for literary labours. Were it not for the state papers preserved
in England, and for a collection of papers made by Sir Frederick Haldimand,
the Swiss soldier of fortune who was governor of Quebec at the time of the
migration, and who had a passion for filing documents away, our knowledge of
the settlements in the Canadas would be of the most sketchy character.

It would serve no good
purpose to attempt here an exhaustive account of the printed sources
relating to the United Empire Loyalists. All that can be done is to indicate
some of the more important. The only general history of the Loyalists is
Egerton Ryerson, The Loyalists of America and Their Times (2 vols., 1880);
it is diffuse and antiquated, and is written in a spirit of undiscriminating
admiration of the Loyalists, but it contains much good material. Lorenzo
Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution (2
vols., 1864), is an old book, but it is a storehouse of information about
individual Loyalists, and it contains a suggestive introductory essay. Some
admirable work on the Loyalists has been done by recent American historians.
Claude H. Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revolution (1902), is a
readable and scholarly study, based on extensive researches into documentary
and newspaper sources. The Loyalist point of view will be found admirably
set forth in M. C. Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution (2
vols., 1897), and The Party of the Loyalists in the American
Revolution (American Historical Review, I, 24). Of special studies in a
limited field the most valuable and important is A. C. Flick, Loyalism in
New York (1901); it is the result of exhaustive researches, and contains an
excellent bibliography of printed and manuscript sources. Other studies in a
limited field are James H. Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the
Other Side of the American Revolution (1910), and G. A. Gilbert, The
Connecticut Loyalists (American Historical Review, IV, 273).

For the settlements of Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick, the most important source is The Winslow
Papers (edited by W. O. Raymond, 1901), an admirably annotated collection of
private letters written by and to Colonel Edward Winslow. Some of the
official correspondence relating to the migration is calendared in the
Historical Manuscript Commission's Report on American Manuscripts in the
Royal Institution of Great Britain(1909), Much material will be found in the
provincial histories of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, such as Beamish
Murdoch, A History of Nova Scotia or Acadie (3 vols., 1867), and James
Hannay, History of New Brunswick (2 vols., 1909), and also in the local and
county histories. The story of the Loyalists of Prince Edward Island is
contained in W. H. Siebert and Florence E. Gilliam, The Loyalists in Prince
Edward Island(Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada,
3rd series, IV, ii, 109). An account of the Shelburne colony will be found
in T. Watson Smith, The Loyalists at Shelburne (Collections of the Nova
Scotia Historical Society, VI, 53).

For the settlements in
Upper and Lower Canada, the most important source is the Haldimand Papers,
which are fully calendared in the Reports of the Canadian Archives from 1884
to 1889. J. McIlwraith, Sir Frederick Haldimand (1904), contains a chapter
on 'The Loyalists' which is based upon these papers. The most important
secondary source is William Canniff, History of the Settlement of Upper
Canada (1869), a book the value of which is seriously diminished by lack of
reference to authorities, and by a slipshod style, but which contains a vast
amount of material preserved nowhere else. Among local histories reference
may be made to C. M. Day, Pioneers of the Eastern Townships (1863), James
Croil,Dundas (1861), and J. F. Pringle, Lunenburgh or the Old Eastern
District (1891). An interesting essay in local history is L. H. Tasker, The
United Empire Loyalist Settlement at Long Point, Lake Erie (Ontario
Historical Society, Papers and Records, II). For the later immigration
reference should be made to D. C. Scott, John Graves Simcoe (1905), and
Ernest Cruikshank, Immigration from the United States into Upper Canada,
1784-1812 (Proceedings of the Thirty-ninth Convention of the Ontario
Educational Association, 263).

An authoritative account of
the proceedings of the commissioners appointed to inquire into the losses of
the Loyalists is to be found in J. E. Wilmot, Historical View of the
Commission for Inquiry into the Losses, Services, and Claims of the American
Loyalists (1815).

For the social history of
the Loyalist settlements a useful book is A 'Canuck' (M. G. Scherk), Pen
Pictures of Early Pioneer Life in Upper Canada(1905). Many interesting notes
on social history will be found also in accounts of travels such as the Duc
de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels through the United States of North
America, the Country of the Iroquois, and Upper Canada (1799), The Diary of
Mrs John Graves Simcoe(edited by J. Ross Robertson, 1911), and Canadian
Letters: Description of a Tour thro' the Provinces of Lower and Upper Canada
in the Course of the Years 1792 and '93 (The Canadian Antiquarian and
Numismatic Journal, IX, 3 and 4).

An excellent index to
unprinted materials relating to the Loyalists is Wilfred Campbell, Report on
Manuscript Lists Relating to the United Empire Loyalists, with Reference to
Other Sources (1909).

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